Bytebreaker start screen

Bytebreaker: A Maze of Piracy

Last spring I taught a Global Video Game course and experimented with Godot for a game design and development assignment. My colleague, Casey Puccini, and I never used Godot game engine before. It was quite a trip for both us and the students as we did not anticipate the level of learning curve demanded by Godot. All in all, it was still a good experience. I would like to thank my students who persevered until the end of the semester learning how to develop a game using Godot with virtually no background in game design or development. They started (as usual) with an ideal project, but had to pivot to a more realistic approach. Most of their projects ended up as reskins of Godot game templates. One of the groups did manage to develop an original game though. It’s a maze puzzle game about game piracy called Bytebreaker. Casey and I were quite impressed with it and I think I am going to use it as a model for the next iteration of the course in spring 2025.

Below is the description of the game:

Bytebreaker explores the dynamic of piracy of popular video games in the global south. By creating a game that highlights this concept, ByteBreaker strives to bring attention to the issue of piracy and issues of inequality in video games by emphasizing the difference in access between consumers in the global north versus the global south.

ByteBreaker is a single-player, first person POV game. The goal of the game is to move throughout the network-like maze and collect all the games on each level. The games to collect are carefully curated as they represent the most pirated games by people in the global south regions.

This game is created and developed as part of an assignment in the Global Video Games course at HWS in Spring 2024.

Developers:

Cullen Beck ’25, Zach Manuel ’24, Laurens Van Alen ’24, Emma Kirts ’24, and Julia Kunzelmann ’24

You can play the game on Itch.io by following this link.

Crunch Culture in Indonesian Video Game and Animation Industry

When I was doing my week-long residency at Georgia College, I came across a news report about a case of workplace exploitation and abuse in Indonesia. At first, I read it out of curiosity and then realized that it is perhaps related to crunch culture and exploitation that have been prevalent in the global video game industry.

The perpetrator, Brandoville Studios, also sounded familiar to me. I tried to remember when I first heard it. It turns out one of my former students at President University did an interview with a game designer who at the time worked at the company, for their thesis project. According to my student, Brandoville Studios had a reputable name in Indonesian video game and animation industry. They always had a strong presence at job fairs. And as a AAA game company, they also had worked with big clients such as Disney. So this is not just a case of a random Indonesian video game company.

This makes me wonder about how much of a norm crunch culture is in Indonesian video game and animation industry. The creative industry in Indonesia has developed rapidly in the last five or ten years. Many Indonesian game and animation studios, as well as individual artists and designers, have worked as subcontractors for big companies like EA, Disney, etc. And I am guessing that these studios and people probably have to sign NDAs for their clients. This is something that I will have to research further.

The case of Brandoville also makes me think about the recent unionization movement in video game industry, particularly in the US. World of Warcraft developers recently formed a union, the largest and most inclusive union at Blizzard. SAG-AFTRA is currently authorizing a video game strike in support of its video game worker members. In an ideal world, I would also like for this unionization movement to happen in Indonesian video game and animation industry. But Indonesia has a union culture that is distinct from the US or many other western countries. So I need to think more about this Brandoville Studios case and its ramification to Indonesian video game and animation industry.

In the meantime, if you are not familiar with crunch culture in video game industry, you can watch this episode from Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act, which is a good intro to understand this problematic culture, that I always use it in my Global Video Games class.

Visiting Georgia College and State University

Poster with title: Gaming Under the New Order: Atari, Dingdong, and the Emergence of Indonesian Video Game Cultures

This coming week I will be visiting Georgia College and State University for a week. A friend of mine, Ruben Yepes, has invited me to participate in the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program organized by the Department of Art. I will be giving guest lectures about anime in Ruben’s classes and a public talk about the history of Atari and dingdong under the Indonesian New Order regime. I am excited and honored for the opportunity.

Headline title of Teaching Media's special issue on Teaching with/around AI

AI Literacy in Higher Education

My collaboration with Suriati Abas about AI literacy in higher education has been published in Teaching Media (link here). The issue also features insightful essays from brilliant scholars such as my colleague Jiangtao Harry Gu. Thanks to Pete Kunze and Kimberly Hall for their hard work of putting this issue together! If you are interested in learning about teaching with/around AI, I would recommend you check out all the articles in the special issue!

Header of close reading/watching/playing post

Webinar: Close Reading/Close Watching/Close Playing

I have been invited by a friend of mine, Eta Farmacelia Nurulhady, to give a webinar on literature and media studies at Universitas Diponegoro in a couple of days. This will be the first time in more than a decade that I have to connect my current research interest to literature. I am a bit nervous since I know that my knowledge of literary analysis is already rusty. That is why I choose to discuss the concept of ‘close reading’ in literature since this concept intertwines with medium-specific analysis in film and video game studies. I hope I will be clear enough to discuss the connections between close reading (in literature), ‘close watching’ (in film studies), and ‘close playing (in video game studies). Do join the webinar if this is a topic that you’d be interested in!

JSTOR Daily article titled "Game, Saw, Conquered: Nationalism in Indonesian Video Games"

JSTOR Daily Feature

I just came across this article posted in JSTOR Daily featuring my research on Nusantara Online game. Didn’t even realize they did this. It is interesting to read how the author connects playable nationalism to the concept of “soft” power.

Here it is: https://daily.jstor.org/game-saw-conquered-nationalism-in-indonesian-video-games/

Image from Pos Kota news daily December 17, 1981

CIVIC Interactive Media and Games Symposium 2024 (Cornell)

Excited to be participating in this symposium. I will be giving a presentation on the historical trajectory of Atari and dingdong, a local form of video game arcades, under the New Order regime. Come check it out if you are in the area!

screen capture for A Space for the Unbound game

Virtual Q&A with Dimas N. Delfiano, game director of A Space for the Unbound

Organizing this event for my Global Video Games course this semester.

Banner of PSN Indonesia 2023 conference

Punkfluencer (PSN Indonesia Conference 2023)

Will be presenting this topic at PSN Indonesia Conference 2023 in the coming weeks. My idea is still not fully formed yet, but what the hey.

Register here if you want to attend the conference (Note: it’s an in-person conference and the language is Indonesian)

Funan scene grab

Intro to Global Animation Syllabus

This semester I am revamping my Intro to Global Animation syllabus. I decided to reduce the reading load because I want students to have more time in practice-based activities. This is also the first time I will try to use a professional stop motion animation software, Dragonframe, for their animation project. Hopefully it will go smoothly.

I also would like to credit Mihaela Mihailova’s “An Anti-Racist Animation Syllabus” for listing animated features and shorts with protagonists of color and/or directed by PoC. Many of the films I use in my course are selected from her list.

Below is my updated syllabus. Leave comments if you have any suggestions as I may still be able to change some of the contents of the course schedule.

Course Description

This course will start with a series of questions:

  • What is animation?
  • How can we discuss animation as an artistic medium and as a cultural expression?
  • How can we understand the global history of animation and its connection to contemporary society?

To answer these questions, we will explore the production, distribution, and consumption of animation as a global phenomenon. Throughout the course, we will consider how animation is a distinctive form of expression within moving-image practice and created in many diverse forms and techniques; how local, national, and transnational contexts contribute to its extensive history worldwide; and how it has become a versatile medium for social, cultural, and political expressions. We will also consider the role of new technologies in the development of animation beyond filmic space (e.g. video games). Through the integration of basic animation production-based exercises (e.g. plasticine, cut-out, pixilation, and hand-drawn animation), visual analyses, and writing assignments, this course will help to cement insights gained through close investigation of various animated media productions. While this course substantially focuses on the practice of animation, no technical knowledge about it is required.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the semester, students will have developed:

  • The knowledge of key animation vocabularies, theories, and techniques within their global, social, cultural, and historical contexts.
  • The ability to apply their knowledge critically and creatively in basic animation production skills, both individually or in collaboration with other student scholars
  • The proficiency in analyzing animation critically in both visual and written formats.
  • The ability to conduct animation studies research using appropriate research strategies
  • The ability to reflect on the interrelationships between their personal encounters with animated media and the global complexity of animation cultures

Evaluation Components

  • Preparation and Participation (10%)
  • Discussion leader (10%)
  • Animation exercises (20%)
  • Animation analysis (10%)
  • Animation festival assignment (10%)
  • Individual animation project (20%)
  • Collaborative animation project (20%)

Course Requirements and Responsibilities

Preparation and Participation (10%):

Class participation is an important element in this course. You will be expected to make quality contribution to class discussion and other aspects of the course. I like to think of our class as a laboratory where we test ideas, take intellectual chances, push ourselves and each other, and support one another as we learn.

You are expected to be well-prepared (meaning: read all the compulsory readings, watch required screenings, play assigned games, and prepare all assignments) and contribute actively to the discussions in the course in a relevant way. Your grade for preparation and participation will reflect your preparation for class, attendance, and participation during individual and group activities, as well as contribution to class discussions. That said, you should not be afraid of making mistakes or working out ideas that you are not sure of. We are all here to learn. I acknowledge these expectations can be daunting for introverted students. If that describes you, we can work out an alternative way to assess your participation. I will give you feedback about how you are doing through office hours and midterm review/recess meetings.

Attendance is part of preparation and participation. Unless you are absent because of sickness or quarantine orders, or religious observance, attendance is mandatory for this class. Students who miss more than two classes without acceptable excuses will receive a 5% deduction from their overall grade. Students who miss more than four classes without adequate excuses will receive a 10% deduction. Students who miss more than five classes without acceptable excuses will fail the course. Students who need special accommodation in this regard should contact me to discuss alternative arrangements and assignments.
You will receive a midterm progress report with an unofficial grade for your “preparation and participation” and suggestions (if necessary) for engaging more fully in our class.

Leading a Discussion (10%)


Starting on Week 2, each student will be asked to lead a class discussion through close reading of select sections of the materials. A class session will usually have two discussion leaders, who may divide the responsibility of leading the discussion. Each student will only lead a class discussion once throughout the semester. Details about this assignment will be explained in class.

Animation exercises (20%):


Throughout the semester, students will complete a variety of short animation exercises. It will range from practicing frame rates, practicing with a variety of animation techniques (plasticine, cut out, pixilation, and hand-drawn animation), writing animation treatment and storyboard, and various other short assignments. These exercises are intended to prepare students for their individual and collaborative stop motion projects. Details about each assignment will be provided in class.

Animation Analysis (10%):


Towards the end of the semester you will complete a 3-5 minute screencast video, or a written paper analyzing an animated film of your own choice. Detailed instructions about this assignment will be distributed in class.

Individual Animation Project (20%):


Students will work individually to create a 30-60 second stop motion animation. Students will choose their own topic/story/technique for this project. Details about this assignment will be provided in class.

Collaborative Animation Project (20%):


Starting in the middle of the semester, we are going to do a collaborative project to create a longer stop motion animation. Details about this assignment will be provided in class.

Animation Festival Assignment (10%)


At the end of the semester, students will be asked to imagine themselves as a curator of a global animation film festival and come up with a curated list of 3-5 animated films for the festival in the most creative way possible. Details about this assignment will be provided in class.

Course Schedule:


* * * Please note that this syllabus is not a static document and the course schedule is subject to change. All changes will be posted to Canvas in advance and announced through email. Readings and screenings are to be completed for the date under which they are listed

WeekDateTopicReadingActivity
18/29Introduction: What do we talk when we talk about animation?Welcome, course organization, and syllabus reviewWatch in class:The Owl Who Married a Goose” (Leaf,1974) “Blinkity Blank” (McLaren, 1955)

8/31
Husbands and Ruddell, “Approaching Animation and Animation Studies” 


Stop motion workshop 1 (frame rates, animating on 1s, 2s, 3s, and 4s)
Watch before class: Oni (The Demon)” (Kawamoto, 1972) “12 Principles of Animation” (AlanBeckerTutorials, 2017)
29/5Tracing Histories
Furniss, “Setting the Scene for Animation”  Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions” 
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class:Pauvre Pierrot” (1892) “A Trip to the Moon” (Méliès, 1902)

9/7

Stop motion workshop 2 (handdrawn stop motion)
# animation exercise 1 due
Watch before class: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Reiniger, 1926)
39/12Realism and the Uncanny ValleyMihailova, “Realism and Animation” Bode, “The Uncanny Valley”
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class:  The Lion King (Favreau, 2019)

9/14

Stop motion workshop 3 (plasticine)
# animation exercise 2 due
Watch before class:  Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV (Nozue, 2016)
49/19Memory and/in AnimationWalden, “Animation and Memory” Gibride, “Perceiving Persepolis” 
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: Persepolis (Satrapi and Paronnaud, 2007)

9/21
Stop motion workshop 4 (cutout)
# animation exercise 3 due
Watch before class: Funan (Do, 2018)
59/26Animation and DocumentationRoe, “Absence, Excess, and Epistemological Expansion” Sofian, “Creative Challenges in the Production of Documentary Animation”
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: Waltz With Bashir (Folman, 2008)

9/28
Stop motion workshop 5 (Pixilation)
# animation exercise 4 due
Watch before class: Flee (Rasmussen, 2021)
610/3Animated Representations
Sammond, “Race, Resistance and Violence in Cartoons” Hassen, “Race and Identity and the Celebration of Black Excellence

Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: Trader Mickey(Gillett and Hand,1932) Jay-Z, “The Story of O.J.” (Romanek and Jay-Z, 2017)

10/5


Stop motion workshop 6 (animation treatment)
# animation exercise 5 due
Watch before class: The Boondocks, S01E01 and E03 (McGruder, 2005)
710/10Fall RecessNo Class

10/12Experimentation and SurrealismTaberhman, “Experimental Animation” Ivins-Hulley, “A Universe of Boundaries” 
Stop motion workshop 7 (character design)
# pre-production assignment 1 due
Watch before class:Kebab World (Theobald, 2014) A Colour Box” (Lye,1935)  FoodSvankmajer, 1992)
810/17Anime: Bodies and FormsDenison, “Anime’s Bodies” Bolton, “From Ground Zero to Degree Zero
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: Ranma 1/2, Season1, Ep. 1 Sailor Moon, Season 1, Ep. 1

10/19
Stop motion workshop 8 (Animation scriptwriting)
# pre-production assignment 2 due
Watch before class:Akira (Otomo, 1988)
910/24Animation and National IdentityWhyke, Mugica, Brown, “Contemporizing the National Style in Chinese Animation” Arps, “An Animated Revolution”
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: Nezha (Jiaozi, 2019)

10/26

Stop motion workshop 9 (Animation storyboarding)
# pre-production assignment 3 due
Watch before class:Battle of Surabaya (Yuniawan, 2015)
1010/31Gendering AnimationDavis, “Women in Disney’s Animated Features 1989-2005” Perea, “Gender and Cartoons from Theaters to Television”
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class:The Princess and the Frog (Clements and Musker, 2009)

11/2


Stop motion workshop 10 (Dragonframe)
# pre-production assignment 4 due
Watch before class:Tehran Taboo (Soozandeh)
1111/7Animated IndigeneityVellino, “Intervening in Settler Colonial Genocide”  Robinson, “People are Finally Listening
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class: – “Four Faces of the Moon” (Strong, 2016)

11/9


Projects’ update 1
Watch before class:Etaspe Komuy” (Ishiguro, 2016) “Mah Meri Stories” (Mustaffa/Santano)
1211/14Animated Nature/EcologyGossin, “Animated Nature” Donsomsakulkij, “Spirited Away”
Discussion leaders (2 students)
Watch before class:Spirited Away (Miyazaki, 2001)

11/16


Projects’ update 2
Watch before class:Boy and the World (Abreu, 2013)
1311/21Fandom
Amon, “Candy Coloured Ponies and Pastel Uniforms” Condry, “Love Revolution”  
Discussion leaders (2 students)
* Animation analysis due
Watch before class: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Season 1, Ep. 1, also available on Netflix Genshiken, Season 1, Ep. 1

11/23November RecessNo Class
1411/28Beyond Filmic FramePallant, “Video Games and Animation” Bowman, “Playing Around with Studio Ghibli
Discussion leaders (2 students)


11/30

Projects’ update 3
** Animation festival assignment due

1512/5The end is the beginningTBA



12/7


*** Individual assignment due



Collaborative project showcase****Collaborative assignment due Tuesday, Dec 12: 8.30-11.30am

+ late or missed assignments must be turned in by this date with no exceptions

The Discourse of Banning PUBG in Indonesia: The Conversation Podcast Interview (2021)

This video is from a podcast interview that I did for The Conversation Indonesia podcast show, SuarAkademia, in 2021. I was invited by Luthfi Dzulfikar, the producer of the podcast program, to discuss about the discourse of “fatwa haram” on video games like PUBG in Indonesia, which I personally think is ridiculous and historically clueless.

I gave my two cents about the long history of moral panic about video games, which usually revolves around the rising popularity of a new genre, or a new mechanic system (e.g. battle royale), and also briefly touched upon my current research on the early history of Indonesian video games culture. You can watch the full interview (in Indonesian) below, or listen to it here.

FLEFF Conversations Across Screen Cultures (2021)

This one here is a video from the Conversations Across Screen Cultures event that’s part of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) in 2021. I am very humbled and honored to be invited by the organizers of this event to talk about my personal trajectory as a scholar in global digital humanities. Big thanks again to the organizers of the event: Patty Zimmermann, Leah Shafer, Enrique González-Conty, and Jiangtao “Harry” Gu, as well as everyone who came to the event.

Hashtag Activism: A Conversation with Moya Bailey (2021)

This one is a video from the Global Digital Humanities event in February 2021 that I moderated. Our guest speaker was Moya Bailey, co-author of the #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020). I really enjoyed moderating this event. Among other things, Moya and I discussed about the position of hashtag activism as a new form of digital activism, especially for people of color and people with disability, and the accusation of hashtag activism as a lazy form of activism, or what they called “slacktivism.” The video is “unlisted,” so it can only be watched directly on YouTube.

PSN Indonesia 2020 Keynote Session

I just realized that I have several videos scattered on YouTube. So in the hope of archiving them, I am going to post them here.

This one here is from the keynote session of the Punk Scholars Network Indonesia 2020. I had a good experience in this session. Thanks William Anthony Yanko for moderating and Muhammad Fakhran Al Ramadhan for organizing the event!

Departure – Student’s work

After taking a long hiatus, I decided to update this personal website with another student appreciation post. This one is an animation work by one of my students at HWS, Jack Harris. He made this work for his independent study in animation aesthetics. It was a bittersweet one for me (and perhaps for Jack as well) since Jack made this project during my last semester at HWS and also his senior year. The title says it all. Enjoy!

Locating Cultures in Video Games and Interactive Fiction: Keynote Talk

So last summer I was invited by a dear friend of mine, Puji Astuti Kasprabowo, to give a keynote talk at her institution, Universitas Negeri Semarang (UNNES). I was honored and excited to give this talk since this is my first proper talk about video game cultures at an Indonesian institution. Plus there is the University of Rochester connection.

However, I was also aware that academic/critical studies of video games are still in its nascent stage in my home country. So I had to make sure that my talk was as accessible as possible to those who are not familiar with video game studies, while still having enough substance for those already familiar with it. So below is my attempt to do so.

So, I would like to start this talk with a statement, that video games are a cultural artifact in the same way as literature, film, and any other expressive forms are. And as a cultural artifact, video games are a medium worthy of rigorous study beyond the influence of mainstream marketing and entertainment discourse. As Clara Fernandez-Vara states, “there is so much more that game analysis can talk about beyond the quality of the graphics or the difficulty curve.”

With this statement in mind, today I will be talking about the concept of global video game cultures. I envision this talk as one of many ways to discuss video games critically. And here, instead of discussing about global video game cultures from the perspective of conventional centers for the production and consumption of games, this talk will focus mainly on what Phillip Penix-Tadsen refers to as game cultures in the global south. The reason of this focus is because often times video game scholarship makes universal claims about global gaming cultures when in fact they talk mostly about Anglo-American, or to a certain extent, Japanese gaming practices. These biases leave the global south regions such as Southeast Asia or Latin America as “the Other” of global gaming culture, while in reality they are integral parts of it. So here a more heterogeneous and nuanced model of global gaming culture is needed.

To discuss about global gaming cultures, I will be dividing my talk into two parts. The first part will examine three main elements of video games, namely game development, in-game worlds, and play experience, to illustrate how culture is incorporated in these elements as well as how it can dynamically emerge from their interconnections. The second part of the talk will discuss about my experience teaching an undergraduate seminar on global video games at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, highlighting several assignments that are designed to develop students’ ability to recognize and situate the cultural impacts of video games globally, and to contextualize how video games can shape our perception, conception, and interaction with our contemporary cultures both at local and global scales. My hope is with this talk we could have a discussion that would enrich and expand our understanding about video games as a medium and as a culture.

And before I go further, I would like to clarify that in the title of this talk I included the phrase interactive fiction. In this case, I will use it interchangeably with video games because I would argue that any narrative-based video game is essentially interactive fiction, even though some scholars may argue differently.

I have to confess that my three categorizations of video game elements are a bit of oversimplification. Elements of video games are much more complex than just these three.

Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort, for instance, distinguish five elements that form a flat ontology of video games.

Meanwhile, Fernandez-Vara in her proposition for textual analysis of video games offers a model of nested building blocks that can be dynamically modified and deconstructed. In my case, my rationale for organizing the elements of video games into three is because I think it will be easy to follow and fits nicely with the triad of production, text, and consumption of video games.

And I also would like to clarify that these three elements are not mutually exclusive. Instead, most of the time they are interconnected with each other. So here we go.

In examining about how game development is inflected with cultural factors, I am going to first introduce a theoretical concept formulated by Bogost called “procedural rhetoric.” In brief, this concept explains how a video game can uniquely express an argument/meaning not through visual or verbal rhetoric, but through the game’s system of rules and mechanics. And this is where game developers/designers can incorporate certain cultural argument/belief into game design/development practices. Let me give you two game examples on how this works in terms of global video game cultures.

Gonzalo Frasca’s September 12th

The first one is September 12th: A Toy World, a game created in 2003 by Gonzalo Frasca, an Uruguayan video game designer and scholar. The game lets the player control and target a missile strike with your mouse to kill terrorist in a bustling town in the Middle East. The objective seems simple enough. Yet, the rules and mechanism of the game make it so that for every terrorist the player kills, many more rise to fill their place. The player will notice that the targeting circle is relatively large. And unlike many war or military games, there is a significant delay from when the player clicks the mouse to the launch of the missile itself. So the likelihood of missing the player’s target and killing civilians are really high. And when the player kills the civilians, others will mourn their deaths and morph into new figures of terrorist. So soon enough, the player’s game screen will be full of terrorists and there is nothing that they can do about it.

Frasca’s September 12th is a game that cannot be won. The only winning scenario is to not play it in the first place. And here the rhetorical argument of the game is quite clear, that the US-lead war on terror campaign after the September 11 tragic event is not working, that violence will only beget violence. And this argument is conveyed mainly through the procedural mechanism of the game that is simple yet elegant. Instead of telling the players its message outright, it allows them to simulate the process and come to their conclusion, perhaps through frustration.

Frasca’s game is part of his life-long project of creating “video games of the oppressed,” using the medium as a tool for education, socio-political awareness, and consciousness-raising. To quote Phillip Penix-Tadsen’s observation about Frasca’s project, “Frasca advocated for the appropriation of the means of game production by actors in the global south, and the repurposing of these technologies in ways that would benefit the region’s inhabitants.” And we can definitely see this in the case of the September 12th game.  

My second game example is Thunderbird Strike, a game designed in 2017 by Elizabeth LaPensée, an Anishinaabe and Métis game designer, as part of her activism against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline that threatens the environmental ecology of Indigenous land in North America. In the game, the player controls an Anishinaabe thunderbird that protects the Great Lakes of North America waterways from the oil pipeline. The game is strongly imbued with Anishinaabe’s visual aesthetics, but here I would like to discuss on elements of its procedural rhetoric.

Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike

As the thunderbird, the player uses lightning energy from the clouds to either destroy pipeline materials, or to energize the fossilized animals and humans. The game mechanic is interesting here because it both describes the act of the thunderbird as an act of destruction and restoration. And this is reflected in the scoring system at the end of each level.

Furthermore, if September 12th is a game that you can’t win, then Thunderbird Strike is the opposite. There is no really losing state in this game, i.e. the player always wins. But winning in this game is not similar to winning in a game like say Fortnite or PUBG. There is not really a reward system for destroying the pipelines materials, or for bringing the fossilized animals to life. And there is not really a punishment system as well. In fact, the player can perhaps let the thunderbird flies without doing anything and they will still complete the level. So winning and losing are not really part of the procedural point of the game here. Instead, the gameplay highlights that the thunderbird’s journey focuses as much on cultural and ecological resurgence within a polluted ecosystem as it does about destroying the oil pipeline. The game here, as Stina Attebery argues, promotes a type of Indigenous posthumanism, which incorporates technologically hybrid posthumans alongside the toxic nonhuman kin that intermingle living and dead matter in our moment of late capitalism and environmental degradation.  

With both September 12th and Thunderbird Strike we can see how culture is inflected through the procedural design of video games. And before I move on to the second element, I want to clarify that procedural rhetoric is not only the domain of the so-called “serious games” like the two I just described here. All video games arguably have their own procedural rhetoric through their rule-based representation and manipulation. In fact, Bogost argues that procedural rhetoric can also be applied to other “play” like environment such as board games or traditional games.

In-game worlds, or the fictional worlds of video games, are probably one of the obvious ways to see how a certain culture is represented in games. And in the context of the global south, it is also where we can see a shared history of reductive and stereotypical representations of the cultures of the region by the developers in the global north. Most audiences in the global south grew accustomed to seeing their cultures depicted in games from outsiders’ perspective, one that shows in many instances the legacy of colonialism, orientalism, and imperialism. See for instance this screenshot from Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction (2010) game.

The two bilingual road signs that you see in this image highlights a kind of ignorance in depicting the Middle East as a region, or in this case Iraq. The sign on the right is written proper Arabic, while what’s supposed to be Arabic on the left sign is just squiggly pseudo-Arabic doodle with no meaning. And you see other instances like this in many games such as Call of Duty franchise, where countries in the global south are depicted merely as a location for the use of the western outsider, and not as sovereign nations with agency of their own.

Because of this shared history, many games developed in the global south, particularly those that deal with national or regional history, try to challenge the global north’s hegemonic and stereotypical portrayal of their nations/regions. Or, to borrow Souvik Mukherjee’s words, to “play back” to the discourses of empire.

One such game that I would like to discuss today is Nusantara Online, a now-defunct Indonesian massively multiplayer online role-playing game/MMORPG. The game was developed by Sangkuriang Internasional and Telegraph Studio in 2006, and was playable until 2013. Nusantara Online/Nusol used the history of three kingdoms in the Indonesian archipelago—Majapahit, Pajajaran, and Sriwijaya—as material for its in-game stories. In the game, players engage in a series of quests and missions drawn from the history of the three represented kingdoms.

Nusol’s use of Indonesian pre-colonial history as its narrative background is what I depicted elsewhere as “playable nationalism,” a ludic construction of digital nationalism that considers the “worlding” of Nusantara as idealized, yet playable environment. And it also highlights the principle of digital collaboration.

In building its nationalistic game, Nusol developers aimed to provide “authentic” illustration of the Indonesian archipelago’s pre-colonial past in visual and narrative forms. They did meticulous research to offer realistic modeling of its game-world and provide an immersive setting in which players can experience. (The game developers actually went to several archaeological sites such as Trowulan for the purpose of this realistic modeling, something that is actually quite rare for a local game development at the time) In the game, players also had a chance to encounter historical figures—both real and fictional—as non-playable characters (NPCs).

Sangkuriang Studio office

Situating the game within the larger framework of Southeast Asian gaming culture, Nusol was also part of the developing trend of networked localism that global blockbuster game developers rarely explore when they produce games that include Southeast Asia. There are other games in the region that adopt narratives of national identity building similar to Nusol, such as King Naresuan Online and 400 Online from Thailand.

Now, Nusol may be a reaction to the global north games’ stereotypical representation of the global south. Yet, I want to argue that it is perhaps too hasty to portray Nusol as a decolonial game project since there are elements in the game that complicate its postcolonial expression. There was a clear sign of idealization in the portrayal of Nusantara as the once-glorious past of Indonesia as a nation, as if the geopolitical concept of Indonesia itself was already there during the historical time period. And if you juxtapose Nusol’s in-game worlding with its procedural elements you find even more contradictions. The game’s racial classification based-on skin color, for instance, reveals a problematic classification. It can be said that there is a discrepancy between Nusol’s representation of its historical in-game world with the procedural elements of the game.

The second game that I will discuss here offers a much more successful combination of in-game world representation and procedural elements compared to Nusol. It is also the subject of my current research. The game is Never Alone/Kisima Inŋitchuŋa, a side-scrolling adventure-puzzle game developed by Upper One Games and first released in 2014.

The game came out of a collaboration between the iñupiat’s Cook Inlet Tribal Council in Alaska and E-Line Media, a New York-based video game education company. It is dubbed as belonging to a new genre of “world games” that intends to empower indigenous community around the world to share their stories in an authentic and engaging way.

The in-game narrative world of Never Alone tells a story about Nuna, a young Iñupiat girl, and an arctic fox, as they embark in an adventure to solve the mystery of the destruction of Nuna’s village. This game narrative is based on the popular traditional Iñupiat tale, “Kunuuksaayuka.”

The focus on the narrative world-building perhaps makes Never Alone less explicitly political as LaPensee’s Thunderbird Strike, the other indigenous video games that I discussed previously. Yet, it does not mean that it follows the same narrative and representational approach as mainstream AAA games produced in the global north.

Never Alone actually represents a distinct view of non-western approach in portraying culture in in-game world. The game’s heavy focus on storytelling is intentional, since storytelling is a medium of cultural transmission and a critical part of Iñupiat culture and many other Indigenous peoples. So the in-game story-building here is not merely a simple act of refashioning the Iñupiat traditional story for the postmodern age. Instead, it functions as an act of survivance, a critical concept in Native American studies. Referring to the works of indigenous scholars such as Anishinaabe’s cultural theorist Gerard Vizenor and LaPensee herself, survivance can be described as Indigenous self-expression in any medium that tells a story about their active presence in the contemporary world and that challenges the discourse of Indigenous victimry or tragedy.

Here, the element of survivance can be identified in how Never Alone focuses its story theme on the communal and collaborative aspect between human, nature, and spiritual being. Throughout the development of the game’s plot, the player will learn how the game is about developing respectful relations with non-human entities such as animals, the Aurora Borealis spirits, the Blizzard man, in short it is about developing respectful relations with nature. The English title itself suggests the theme of the game, that human beings are intimately enmeshed in webs of relationship with each other and with the other entities that inhabit the world.

And this narrative theme is also neatly incorporated in the procedural elements of the game. In the game, the player both plays as Nuna and the fox and work together to solve puzzles. The game mechanic also makes the player aware that they are part of a network of relations within the game environment. For instance, they learn that the blizzard wind can knock them over, but also can be used to aid their jump. They also learn that the bear can kill them but it is also an important part in completing the player’s final adventure quests. So here, the procedural elements of the game suggest that we humans should not fight against or try to conquer nature but instead respectfully engaging with it for our own survival. In this way, as Kateryna Barnes suggests, the game becomes a pedagogy of relationality with the environment or land through an indigenous lens, as opposed to a western colonial perspective which sees nature as a threat to be harnessed.

So, with the examples of Nusol and Never Alone, we can see how culture can be represented in in-game worlds of video games from the global south’s perspective with plurality of approaches and varying success.

Okay, now we have come to the last part of my first section, which is about locating cultures in play experience. Play experience here is having to do with the agency of the player in video games. As scholars such as Alex Galloway and Fernandez-Vara assert, the figure of the player is a necessary and integral part of video games. Without player input, video games are not complete, and this is what makes it unique as an expressive medium. Often times in their interaction with system of rules in games, players also try to break these rules and create goals for themselves. Players can also communicate and relate to each other through the game, and this is what turns the activity of game-playing into social activities. So here you can see how, as Fernandez-Vara argues, by necessity video games are a medium that establishes a dialogue between the game and the players, and amongst players.

I would also like to point out that scholars who are more interested in player experience, or who adopt a play-centric approach in examining video games, have frequently criticized the procedural rhetoric approach that I discussed in the first part of this section. According to the play-centric scholars such as Miguel Sicart, proceduralism marginalizes the ways in which people play by stipulating that meaning largely precedes the act of play and that proceduralism grants power and influence, perhaps too much, to the game designer and developer.

For the play-centric scholars, thus, actions and meanings cannot prefigure play. Different players may have distinct experiences in playing games, and thus making sense of them differently as well. It is the unfolding of meaningful experience through the process of play that is the emphasis of the play-centric game scholarship. Now, I myself think that the play-centric criticism towards procedural rhetoric is quite valid in many ways. Yet, I think a rigorous study of video games should pay equal attention towards the three elements that I discuss here.

And in terms of locating cultures in play experience, I would like to focus on one phenomenon in the context of the global south gaming cultures. That phenomenon is modding.

Modding is an umbrella term that encompasses a large number of practices of customizing, tailoring, or remixing games or game contents by players, in order to suit their desires and interests. It is perhaps the type of play practice that challenges the concept of procedural rhetoric the most, because it demonstrates how players can have the control to significantly alter the systems of rule of a game beyond what the game designers have programmed it to do. That is why in some cases modding practice is actually heavily regulated and sometimes even forbidden. Nonetheless, there are games like Minecraft or Europa Universalis series that are deliberately designed to be modified by their players.

Modding can also be utilized by players, particularly from the global south, to represent their own cultures. For instance, a group of Indonesian players developed a mod of a historical real-time strategy game Rome: Total War-Barbarian Invasion, which they call Nusantara: Total War.

In this mod, they strive to accurately represent the history of military invasions in Nusantara region from the time of the first Portuguese invasion of Malacca in 16th century, to the conclusion the Dutch-Portuguese wars in 17th century. What is also interesting about this mod is that the modder group promotes a pan-Southeast Asian perspective rather than a strictly nationalist Indonesian one like we see in Nusantara Online game. They are aware that the geopolitical concept of Nusantara is not limited to just Indonesia only, but also covers region such as Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. That is also the reason why they were actively seeking modders from other Southeast Asian countries to collaborate. This type of modding practice can be seen as a response to the hegemonic and Eurocentric perspective of historical games made in the global north, which as I mentioned before usually place non-western peoples and cultures outside of history.

However, here I would still be cautious in characterizing modding as a wholly progressive approach to play back against the hegemonic discourse of the global north in terms of play experience. As Rhett Loban and Thomas Apperley discover in their study of Europa Universalis IV modding practice by Indigenous player from Oceania, portraying the perspective of Indigenous people, or in other words marginalized communities, through modding is difficult. Particularly because of the centrality of very Eurocentric elements that are embedded in the game software. Thus, unless these communities of players create entirely new games, they still have to deal with the hegemonic procedural elements of these games in their modding practices.    

Okay, so after learning about global video game cultures, comes a question for an educator like me: how can you teach it in a college setting? In this section, I am going to tell a little a bit of story about my experience teaching a global video games seminar at my current institution.

I have the opportunity to teach a seminar course called Global Video Games: Cultures, Aesthetics, Politics. In this course we mainly discuss the things that I just described throughout my talk today. And here I would also like to share with you that most of my students are either only familiar with mainstream and US-centered AAA games such as Call of Duty, NFL Madden, or Mario Kart, or they are interested in video games but would not really call themselves gamers. Very few of them are familiar with indie gaming, let alone global gaming cultures. So for most of them, the course was their first experience in learning about video games seriously and critically.

So the first thing I did was to tell them the same statement that I made at the beginning of this talk, that video games are cultural artifact and I want them to treat it as such. And I also assured them that it’s okay if they are not familiar with global gaming cultures because that is actually what we’re going to learn in the course. There’s actually no requirement that you have to be a gamer in taking this course. And I also made them aware from the very beginning, especially to those who are familiar with mainstream AAA games, that the games we’re going to play and study in this seminar are probably the ones they have never heard of/played before. And that’s intentional, because again I want them to expand their knowledge about video games from a global perspective.       

To engage my students with the material, I organized my course so that in our twice a week meeting we first discuss about video game theories and general concepts such as procedural rhetoric and play-centric approach. And then in the second meeting, we would focus on a specific game or a case study. This way they would be familiar in the way scholars talk about video games and examine them critically, and also have the opportunity to apply the theoretical concepts they have learned from the first meeting.

I also asked my students to play the games we discussed every week. In this case, we normally play one or two games a week. This game session is a crucial part in my course because just like a close-reading is necessary in analyzing literature, close-playing a game will also give students a chance to explore elements in a video game that would help them in expanding their interpretation and analysis of it.

And to enhance my students’ understanding about global gaming cultures, I designed several assignments that would help them develop nuanced perspectives on video games. And I am going to briefly talk about two of them.

So, one of the assignments that I asked my students to do is a video essay assignment. This assignment is designed as a substitute for a formal term paper. Here, I encouraged my students to provide a critical analysis of a video game in the style that is already popular in global gaming cultures, a video format. I also let them adopt a fictional persona in making their video essay if they were comfortable with it. With this assignment, I wanted my students to practice their medium-specific analysis of video games and applying critical theories and methods that we had covered throughout the course.

One of my students’ video essay

The other assignment that I developed in my course is a collaborative game project. Here, I asked my students to work in a small group to develop a simple game that creatively demonstrates their engagement with the course material that they have explored throughout the semester. This hands-on experience is an integral part of my pedagogical approach in all the courses that I teach, because I believe that students would gain a much better understanding about media cultures when they shift their position from being passive media interpreters into engaged participant-observers.

Since my course is not a technical game development course, I emphasized to my students that I did not expect them to create a technically-sophisticated game. Especially since most, if not all of them did not have any game design/development experience before taking the course. Rather, I challenged them to engage in a process called “theory by design” developed by Walter Holland, Henry Jenkins, and Kurt Squire, where instead of working through ideas in an expository fashion, they would do so through creative development, putting themselves in game developers’ shoes.

It’s also because of this reason that I chose two simple platforms, Scratch and Twine, for students to utilize. Scratch is a simple programming platform developed by MIT for the purpose of teaching kids how to code. While Twine is a free and open source tool to create interactive fiction developed by Chris Klimas. So I asked my students to explore these two platforms in a workshop and pick the one they are most comfortable with for their project. As a side note, I highly recommend Twine here for those of you who study literature and want to delve into interactive fiction. It is a simple yet robust platform for making text-based games or interactive fiction, with a relatively low barrier of learning curve.

One of my students’ game project

So, throughout my talk today, I have tried to illustrate how video games can be a medium that offers people ways to understand the world, as well as how the ways people understand the world can shape the production, circulation, and consumption of video games. I approach this through the framework of global gaming cultures with the emphasis from the global south perspective, because I believe that this perspective can enrich our viewpoints about the role of video games in culture, and provide a more nuanced understanding of games as a truly global phenomenon. I have to admit that there are still many elements that I neglected in my exploration of global gaming cultures here. But I hope that it can be a starting point in thinking about what and how video games can mean to our society.

Intro to Global Animation: Students’ Works

This is a student appreciation post.

Throughout the pandemic teaching classes has been especially hard and exhausting. I have experienced a variety of challenges and setbacks in teaching my courses that sometimes drained my soul and put me at the edge of frustration.

Thankfully, I always have several students who can make my day, and make me feel better about myself as a teacher. In this post I am going to feature several of the works by my students in Intro to Global Animation course at HWS.

A shot from Norman McLaren’s Blinkity Blank

These students have really made it easy for me to teach the materials with their intelligence, passion, critical insights, and creativity.

I have gotten permission to share their work here, so I am going to also share their identities. Do please share this post as widely as possible if you’d like, because I would like their works to be acknowledged by the public.

Hamburger (Max Harris, H ’20)

Collaborative Animation Scene (Max Harris, H ’20)

Pixilation Exercise (Max Harris, H ’20)

Cutout Animation Exercise (Max Harris, H ’20)

Clay Animation Exercise (Max Harris, H ’20)

Pasta Con Le Sarde (Jack Harris, H’21)

Collaborative Animation Scene (Jack Harris, H ’21)

Pixilation Exercise (Jack Harris, H ’21)

Cutout Animation Exercise (Jack Harris, H ’21)

Clay Animation Exercise (Jack Harris, H ’21)

It’s Crunch Time (Maggie Bonomo, WS ’21)

Collaborative Animation Scene (Maggie Bonomo, WS ’21)

Cutout Animation Exercise (Maggie Bonomo, WS ’21)

The Lonely Flower (Sarah Smith, WS ’21)

Cutout Animation Exercise (Sarah Smith, WS ’21)

Punk dancing

Keynote Paper – Punk Scholars Network Indonesia Conference 2020

So last fall I was invited to give a talk about punk in Indonesia for Punk Scholars Network Indonesian branch. It’s part of the Network’s annual international conference and symposium.

I was excited but also nervous to give a talk at this conference. It’s been a long while since I wrote anything about punk (14 years to be exact). And I also felt humbled since the other keynote speakers were punk scholars whose work about Indonesian punk/underground communities I really admire. I almost said no actually, but after some thought I agreed to be one of the speakers since I wanted to start writing about punk again.

So below is the text of my talk. It’s sort of an update to my last writing about Indonesian punk. It’s far from a smart take, but it did make me want to write about Indonesian punk again. And I also want to give a shout out to Muhammad Fakhran al Ramadhan for giving me the opportunity to give this talk.

Dancing Pogo with the Culture Industry Revisited: A Distant Reading of Indonesian Punk Cultures

Let me start with this statement: Although I grew up with punk during the new order regime and wrote a couple of papers about punk in Indonesia that I presented more than a decade ago, I have not been in direct contact with the Indonesian punk scene for more than 10 years ever since I left Indonesia to study and now teach here in the States. So today I am going to update my thoughts about contemporary Indonesian punk cultures as a distant reader. I am going to do it through revisiting the last paper I wrote and presented about Indonesian punk, titled, “Dancing Pogo with the Culture Industry”; hence the addition of the word “revisited” in my presentation title for today. I hope it makes sense in the context of the theme of today’s conference, “doing local, doing global” and is worthy of discussion. I truly appreciate any kind of feedback from the audience here.

In the old version of this paper, I used the framework of the culture industry formulated by Frankfurt School theorists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, to examine the emergence of punk in Indonesia as a counterculture movement and I am going to do that again. For those not familiar with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s formulation of the culture industry, for them it is a concept that refers to the commercialization of culture and how it perpetuates the dominant ideology. Back then, I argued that the emergence of punk as a counterculture movement in Indonesia, in the words of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s, was “made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.”[1]

Punk was initially exported to Indonesia in the 1990s as a commercial package of “anti-establishment” music via major label distribution of commercially hyped groups such as Green Day and the Offspring. At the time, the Indonesian youth (I was one of them) were classified, organized, and labeled as the target market by the culture industry in their global expansion. Although as my fellow keynote speaker, Jeremy Wallach, points out, “the Indonesian punks’ tastes quickly turned to less hyped but indisputably seminal bands from the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the Ramones, the Exploited, and the Sex Pistols.”[2] This kind of incorporation, I argued then and now, significantly marks the development of the Indonesian punk movement up to the present.

In the old version of this paper, I described how initially, the culture industry presented the Indonesian youth with naturalized forms of punk. In this case, punk had already been predesigned as, to quote Horkheimer and Adorno again, “feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it.”[3] The culture industry had already understood that one of the characteristics of the global youth culture is its spirit for resistance. As Dylan Clark states in his chapter, “[t]he image of rebellion has become one of the most dominant narratives of the corporate capitalist landscape: the ‘bad boy’ has been reconfigured as prototypical consumer [original italics].”[4] Therefore, when the culture industry brought punk to Indonesia, it promoted punk’s rebellious ideology in order to capture the youth as consumer. Through such apparatuses as commercial magazines and radio stations, the culture industry encourages Indonesian youth to buy its cultural package. To quote Leslie Haynsworth, “by promoting [the] artists’ countercultural stances, the corporate music industry and the mainstream music press are disseminating—and more importantly, endorsing—subcultural values, practices, and iconographies [original italics].”[5] One such instance in my memory was when Hai magazine published a special “HaiKlip” issue on punk in 1996, featuring Green Day, the Offspring, and Rancid.

In my previous examination, I also connected my framework of the culture industry in the development of punk in Indonesia in the 1990s with the context of Soeharto’s new order regime. The new order state, with its repressive and ideological apparatuses, tried to control the lives of the people including the youth. One of the state’s tools to control the youth is through family institution.

In his study of Indonesian “street kids” (anak jalanan) as a form of subculture, Kirik Ertanto argues that according to the new order’s State Law “family decision-making is used as a tool to achieve national development…. The youth is perceived as valuable national asset. Therefore, efforts to produce improved human capital should be executed as early as possible.”[6] This condition prompted the repression of youth by their parents as the extension of the state’s apparatuses. This is one of the reasons why some Indonesian youth were absorbed by punk as a cultural product. They were more than eager to accept punk’s ideas of anarchism in order to resist the parent/state repressive culture.

Then, I also made a note about the class dynamic in the introduction of punk to Indonesia. I argued that the Indonesian upper middle class youth had a mediatory role in bringing punk and its anti-establishment, anti-consumerism, and anti-authoritarian ideologies to Indonesia, since for a non-English-speaking country like Indonesia it was almost impossible for the working class youth to be able to directly access punk products from countries such as the US and the UK.[7] Through the mediation of the middle class youth as both “the prestige seeker and the connoisseur,”[8] punk products were disseminated to other youth who do not have direct access to them via bootlegged records and xeroxed copies of zines, such as Profane Existence, Maximum RockNRoll, and EqualizingxDistort. I argued here that this “illegitimate” chain of distribution had in many ways disrupted the position of the culture industry as a hegemonic commercial practice. Reflecting on this, the mediation of the Indonesian middle class youth perhaps also explains why certain punk groups got popular among Indonesian punks compared to their contemporaneous compatriots, something that mystified Wallach at the time of his study of Jakarta punks.[9]

Hardcore fans explode into a mosh pit in a community center in Malang

This was also where I pointed out how through the “unwilling” incorporation with the culture industry, which I frame as a kind of pogo dancing, Indonesian punk developed their utopian goals as a counterculture movement. In this case, I questioned Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s argument that the culture industry “not for a moment … [allows its consumers] any suspicion that resistance is possible.”[10] At the time, I argued that it was through their “dance” with the culture industry, that punk in Indonesia was able to posit themselves as, in Stacy Thompson’s words, “the placeholder for the possibility of a cultural form that resists its own commodification.”[11]

In order to support my argument at the time, I described several phases in Indonesian punk’s dance with the culture industry. First, I looked at the mimicry phase of Indonesian punk where they started to imitate “conventional” punk fashion (studded leather jackets, doc martens boots, mohawk hairstyle), form their own bands—first performing covers of seminal punk bands and then writing their own songs—and also produced domestic version of punk zines. I argued that although this phase might confirm Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s assertion that “[i]n the culture industry…imitation finally becomes absolute,”[12] it was not a simple and immediate reaction.

To prove my point, I chronicled how the imitation of punk fashion by Indonesian youth at this mimicry phase was at first, following Dick Hebdige’s formulation, a semiotically rootless and perhaps a costly one. I asserted that studded leather jacket and doc marten boots do not semiotically signify “working-classness” in Indonesia.[13] Yet, I also pointed out that the shock value of that kind of punk fashion can still be regarded as “a symbolic violation of the social order,”[14] at least initially. I also pointed out the nuance in the local punk bands’ preference for using English lyrics despite their lacking language skills. The use of English lyrics, I argued then, could also be perceived as a subcultural reaction against Indonesian major label companies who generally restricted its use.

            Then I moved to discuss the next phase when the figure of punks gradually became widely recognized in the Indonesian popular culture landscape. Here I focused on how the culture industry started to see local punk groups as a marketable product, which happened around the same time when pop punk bands such as Blink 182 and Sum 41 dominated international rock charts in the early 21st century, and when MTV broadcast its programs in Indonesia through syndication with a national private station. I mentioned how, similar to what has happened in the US or the UK, major record labels started to seek potential local punk bands to market them to the public, such was the case with Superman is Dead (SID) from Bali and Burgerkill from Bandung.

            Yet, I also argued then that in this post-mimicry phase many Indonesian punks have now become familiar with the philosophy of DIY, anarcho-punk, and anti-fascism. I asserted that just like some of the Indonesian punk bands went “mainstream,” some others grew more political and took a harder stance towards the culture industry. Here, I mentioned the emergence of countercultural collectives such as Forum Anti Fasis, Kontra Kultura, Utopian, and Akar Jelata in Indonesia as examples of the progressive movement within Indonesian punks.

            I ended my argument back then with kind of a naïve assertion that despite their inability to break away from the culture industry’s master discourse, Indonesian punks were realizing their utopian goals as a counterculture movement in the post-Soeharto era with their progressive, anti-hierarchical, and self-reflexive mindset. Here, I cited a portion of song “Suatu saat nanti” (Someday) from the seminal anarcho-punk band from Jakarta, Bunga Hitam to prove my point.

            Now looking back on my argument, I actually find it somewhat too optimistic and lacking depth. Not only did I trap myself into the monolithic thinking of the culture industry, I neglected to attend to the richness and diversity of Indonesian punks themselves. For one, I did not necessarily consider the role of built environment and social contours of major cities and regions such as Jakarta, Bandung, Denpasar, and Kuta in shaping Indonesian punk scenes and cultures and how these places and spaces are simultaneously shaped by the existence and development of their local punk scenes. At the time, I was not yet aware of the work by another of my fellow keynote speakers for today, Emma Baulch, who has examined the complexity of localization or hybridization of global media forms, such as punk, within the local cultural logics of “Balinese-ness” in Bali underground scene.[15] I was also not yet aware of Sean Martin-Iverson’s work that looks into the dialectic of “territorialization” and “deterritorialization” in the development of the Bandung hardcore punk scene and their orientation as part of global hardcore punk scene.[16] To put it simply, I failed to consider the messiness in Indonesia punks’ pogo dancing with the culture industry as I treated it more like line dancing.

A crowd goes crazy for Straight Answer in Jakarta

In addition, things have drastically changed in Indonesia and in Indonesian punk scenes themselves since the last time I wrote my essay. For example, now Indonesia has a self-described “metalhead” as president (for better or worse), social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Instagram have also become so popular in the country, and there is also a worrying phenomenon of socio-political polarization in the country, mostly based on religious identity and populist nationalism. All of which I believe have affected local and global expressions of Indonesian punks.

So today I would like to attend to some of the messy entanglements that I have recently observed in the pogo dance between Indonesian punks and the culture industry, or more accurately culture industries, since the singular term assumes a monolithic domination while the plural forms better reflect the complexity and contradictions within its operations. I am going to start with the phenomenon of the “religious turn” of Indonesian punks, something that my fellow keynote speakers Hikmawan Saefullah, or “Papap,” examines in his article, “Nevermind the jahiliyyah, here’s the hijrahs,”[17] and will also most likely be discussed in detail by him today. Examining the emergence of religious underground collectives and hijrah groups that undertake Islamic proselytization in the scene, such as the One Finger Movement, the Ghuraba Militant Tauhid, and The Hijrah Youth Movement, Saefullah suggests that this religious turn within the Indonesian underground scene is “a result of the absence of a coherent political Left within the subculture and the high financial and social cost of maintaining underground culture and ideology.”[18]

I could not agree more with his analysis. However, I would also like to add that this religious conservative turn can also be understood through a larger picture in the landscapes of the cultural industries in Indonesia. Just as punk productions got commodified by the force of the cultural industries, which demoralized some of the participants in the Indonesian punk scene according to Saefullah, the country has also witnessed the marketing and commodification of piety in Islamic teachings in the post-Soeharto era. As discussed by scholars such as James B. Hoesterey and Marshall Clark, in the post-new order era there is a boom in the so-called “pop Islam,” which incorporates genres such as sastra Islami (Islamic literature), film Islami (Islamic film), and sinetron Islami (Islamic soap operas), along with other products that “breathe Islam” and the popularity of pop preachers like AA Gym or the late Jefri Al Buchori.[19]

The introduction and rapid popularity of social media platforms have also contributed to this growth of popular branding of Islam, especially among the middle class, in the form of microcelebrities and influencers. Emma and Alila Pramiyanti, for instance, discuss about one phenomenon related to this: the hijabers of Instagram.[20] I believe the phenomenon of the religious turn in Indonesian punk scenes cannot be wholly detached from this broad context. Perhaps, the Indonesian punk scene has become the latest pop culture victim of this “brand Islam.”

Another thing that I have also observed from afar is the incorporation of nationalistic themes in punk productions, especially in the so-called “mainstream” punk groups. Consider for instance this lyrics from Superman is Dead (SID)’s song, “Jadilah legenda” (Be a legend):

Listening to the lyrics, I cannot help but wonder if this song were released during the new order era, perhaps the Soeharto regime would be pleased with Indonesian punk’s patriotism, even if there is an interpretation that this song is dedicated to the working class.  SID is not the only group which incorporates nationalistic theme into their songs, I have also observed similar adoption in the songs from such groups as pop punk Pee Wee Gaskins’ “Dari mata sang garuda” (From the eye of garuda)[22], the seminal alternative punk band Netral’s “Garuda Di Dadaku” (Garuda on my chest),[23] and many other bands as well.

Perhaps this “nationalistic turn” is one of the impacts of the shift in using the Indonesian language as the preferred lyrical language among Indonesian punk groups, something that Wallach argues as enabling punk bands to more successfully position themselves as the voice of local youth and develops a sense of the underground as a national scene.[24] Perhaps this is also another consequence of the absence of the coherent political left in the subculture that Saefullah mentioned in the case of the “religious turn” in punk. But again, I would like to look at this nationalistic punk phenomenon as a part of a larger trend in the Indonesian cultural landscape in post-Reformasi era. Indonesian punks’ incorporation of nationalism develops around the same time when nationalism, or expressions of “banal nationalism” to borrow Michael Billig’s formulation, re-emerges as a marketable product for the youth.[25] I am somewhat familiar with this because I have done research on the phenomenon of digital nationalism in post-Soeharto era. From nationalistic-themed movies such as Merah Putih (Yadi Sugandi, 2009), to nationalistic video games like Nusantara Online (Sangkuriang/Telegraph, 2010-2013), to patriotic social media events like “upacara bendera digital” (digital flag-hoisting ceremony), the concept of banal nationalism has been re-branded into an appealing and marketable product for the Indonesian youth. And Indonesian punks have experienced this as well.

Of course there are oppositional voices against this nationalistic turn in Indonesian punk scenes as can be seen in the song from Bandung’s legendary hardcore punk band Turtles Jr., “Bakar bendera” (“Burn your flag”),[26] or a more blatant one from Bandung’s anarchopunk band, Milisi Kecoa, “Ganyang nasionalisme” (“Down with nationalism”).[27]

Yet, things get complicated when you also have punk groups that adopt a nationalistic attitude while simultaneously embracing the spirit of anarchism. I find this tendency in groups such as Rebellion Rose from Yogyakarta that claims “nasionalisme adalah harga mati” (“nationalism is non-negotiable”) to emphasize its absoluteness, while also promoting anarchist values.[28] Even the public face of anarcho-punk in Indonesia, Marjinal, recently released a single titled, “Indonesia Memanggil” (“Indonesia Calling”), which has lyrics like this:

Perhaps the marriage between nationalism and anarchism in Indonesian punk has not necessarily turned into the adoption of national-anarchism as a rebranding of totalitarian fascism yet, but it does not mean that it will not turn into a dangerous territory given the global history of fascist cooptation of punk as seen in the skinhead/bonehead phenomenon, and the recent embrace of populist nationalism in Indonesia.

There is also a phenomenon of folk culture revival in the Indonesian punk scene, which I think of it as a kind of offshoot of this nationalistic turn. One example of this is Punklung, who combines underground style with traditional Sundanese bamboo percussion instrument such as calung and angklung. I believe one of the presenters in this conference is going to discuss this in detail and I am looking forward to it.

The last thing that I would like to discuss in regard to the complexity of the Indonesian punk’s pogo dance with the culture industries is something that I am myself also complicit in, which is the adoption of popular social media and streaming platforms such as Youtube and Spotify in the local and global circulation of Indonesian punk’ productions. This is of course not unique to Indonesia only since these platforms are popular globally. However, it adds another layer of messiness in the adoption of principles like DIY, or anarcho-punk by the Indonesian punks.

Let’s use Youtube for example. This digital platform has grown from amateur video-sharing platform to become one of the world’s most powerful digital platforms covering not only music but also things like make-up tutorials, how-to videos, and other stuff. It is also my go-to platform to get my fix of Indonesian underground scene. On Youtube, I can watch music videos from some of my favorite bands like Turtles Jr., Jeruji, Sendal Jepit, and many more. The platform also enables me to discover newer bands like Joey the Gangster and Saturday Night Karaoke. In a way, Youtube has become one of the principal media for many Indonesian punk groups to participate in the global underground marketplace.  

However, Youtube is also a for-profit platform. In fact, Youtube and other popular digital platforms have been categorized by several media scholars as the representative of “platform imperialism,” or “platform capitalism.”[29] Youtube is also not neutral in its technological design. With its algorithmic architecture that creates a particular participation framework that calculates how many times a video is watched/clicked, how many people like/dislike it, how many people share it on another platform, etc., Youtube has encouraged a certain mode of usage over another.[30] And this can create interesting circumstances for Indonesian punk groups, especially those who espouse DIY ethics.

For example, Marjinal’s music video “Luka Kita” (Our Pain) from their official Youtube channel has garnered more than nine hundred thousand views on Youtube, liked by 9.6k people, and disliked by 224, and have 609 comments. What does this mean for the anarcho-punk band? Do they care about this transparent data of those who like and dislike their video? Do they monetize from the views? Do they read the comments? Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. Yet, these algorithmic metrics are the principal logic of Youtube platform, and it is hard not to notice them, or not care about them when we use the platform.

Yet, I also believe that this is a much more complex situation than the discourse of “sell-out,” or simple commercialization. Because there are some Indonesian punk groups who have visible presence on Youtube, but still circulate their music independently.[31]

In addition, those who resist participating on Youtube can still have a “phantom” presence on the platform. For instance, Jakarta anarcho-punk band Bunga Hitam is well-known for their stance against any type of non-DIY media. Yet, you can still feel their presence on Youtube in the form of videos posted by their “fans,” who sometimes also request their audience to like and subscribe to their videos.

This entangled situation happens because digital platforms like Youtube operate within a dual logic of commercialism and community that relies on the existence of network(s). To paraphrase Ulises A. Mejias, while networked platforms are responsible for privatizing and commodifying social relations, they also have made sociality more vibrant and interconnected, making it easier (not harder) to express oneself, exercise one’s rights, organize against injustice, give voice to minorities, democratize knowledge and cultural production, and so on.[32] Thus, in the case of the Indonesian punk’s adoption of digital networked platforms, perhaps it is because their benefits outweigh the costs.

So, to end my presentation, I would like to offer a kind of reflection about this updated pogo dance between the Indonesian punk and the culture industries. First, it surely creates a much messier and entangled landscape of Indonesian punks and their politics. But if you think about it, pogo dancing or moshing is always messy and can be chaotic. There can be antagonism. Even fights sometimes break during pogo dancing. So perhaps this messiness is always expected from punk. Second, while it seems that the Indonesian punk may lose their oppositional and progressive valence considering the religious and nationalistic turn within their scene, as well as their adoption of various digital platforms that privatize and commodify social relations, I am still cautiously optimistic with their persistent potential as resistant alternative community that can disrupt and challenge the contemporary forces of the culture industries. Lastly, perhaps with its ambivalent characteristics as “both resistant and [commodified][33]” the Indonesian punk scene is not striving to accomplish a utopia as I initially suggested. But it is more for developing a heterotopia, a counter-site “in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”[34] Thank you.


[1] Horkheimer, Marx and Theodor W. Adorno. “From Dialectic of Enlightenment,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st Edition. Vincent B. Leitch, et al. (Eds.), New York: W W Norton & Company, 2001: 1226

[2] Wallach, Jeremy, “Living the Punk Lifestyle in Jakarta,” Ethnomusicology 52.1, 2008: 99.

[3] Horkheimer and Adorno, 1223.

[4] Clark, Dylan, “The Death and Life of Punk, the Last Subculture,” in The Post-Subcultures Reader, David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl (Eds.), New York: Berg, 2003: 223.

[5] Haynsworth, Leslie, “‘Alternative’ Music and the Oppositional Potential of Generation X Culture,” in GenXegesis: Essays on “Alternative” Youth (Sub)Culture, John M. Ulrich and Andrea L. Harris, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003: 55.

[6] Ertanto, Kirik, “Anak Jalanan dan Subkultur: Sebuah Pemikiran Awal,” KUNCI Cultural Studies Center, Esai dan Teori, 2000, http://kunci.or.id/esai/misc/kirik_anak.htm, accessed November 27, 2006

[7] My use of the word “products” here follows Stacy Thompson’s materialist theory of punk economics that situates punk’s material productions and social relations within the broader fields of music industry, the commodity form, and contemporary capitalism. See, Thompson, Stacy, Punk Productions: Unfinished Business, New York: SUNY Press, 2004.

[8] Horkheimer and Adorno, 1239.

[9] Wallach, 99-100.

[10] Horkheimer and Adorno. 1232.

[11] Thompson, 134.

[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, 1228.

[13] Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, New York: Routledge, 1988: 63.

[14] Hebdige, 19.

[15] Baulch, Emma, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in 1990s Bali, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

[16] Martin-Iverson, “Bandung Lautan Hardcore: Territorialisation and deterritorialisation in an Indonesian hardcore punk scene,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 15: 4, 2014: 532-52.

[17] Saefullah, Hikmawan, “Nevermind the jahiliyyahs, here’s the hijrahs: Punk and the religious turn in the contemporary Indonesian underground scene,” Punk & Post-Punk, V. 6:2, 2017: 263-289.

[18] Saefullah, 264.

[19] Hoesterey, James B. and Marshall Clark, “Film Islami: Gender, Piety, and Pop Culture in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia,” Asian Studies Review, V. 36, 2012: 207-26.

[20] Baulch, Emma, and Alila Pramiyanti, “Hijabers on Instagram: Using Visual Social Media to Construct the Ideal Muslim Woman,” Social Media + Society, October-December 2018: 1-15.

[21] Superman is Dead, “Jadilah Legenda,” Sunset di Tanah Anarki, 2013, Sony Music Indonesia.

[22] Pee Wee Gaskins, Ad Astra Per Aspera, 2010, Alfa Records.

[23] Netral, The Story Of, 2009, Kancut Records.

[24] In Martin-Iverson, 540.

[25] Billig, Michael, Banal Nationalism, London: Sage Publication, 1995.

[26] Turtles Jr., Bintang Mati, Kuyangora Records, 2008

[27] Milisi Kecoa, Kalian Memang Menyedihkan!, Self-released, 2010.

[28] Rebellion Rose, “Artist Bio,” Reverbnation, https://www.reverbnation.com/rebellionroseyk.

[29] See, Jin, Dal Yong, Digital Platforms, Imperialism, and Political Culture, NY and London: Routledge, 2015; and Srnicek, Nick, Platform Capitalism, London: Polity, 2016.

[30] Although this does not necessarily mean that this mode of usage is absolute.

[31] I can categorize Turtles Jr. in this category for instance.

[32] Mejias, Ulises A., Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World, Minneapolis: U. Minnesota Press, 2013.

[33] Thompson, 135.

[34] Foucault, Michel, “Of Other Spaces,” 1967, https://foucault.info/documents/heterotopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en/.  

Anna

Aesthetics of Animation: Student’s Independent Study

The pandemic has been hard for me, both physically and mentally. That is why I took a long hiatus from posting here (not that I was diligent in posting before the pandemic).

Now that it seems likely we have to live with Covid-19 forever, I have to start posting again in this site, mainly to keep my sanity. So my plan is to revisit things that I have done since the beginning of pandemic in a linear fashion and post it here perhaps once or twice a week.

I want to start by featuring an animated work by one of my students who recently graduated. She is a highly talented student who is full of creativity and intelligence. She always tries to push her limits in everything that she does and I really miss having her in my classes.

The work below is from her independent study with me on the aesthetics of animation. She made a short and moving animation about living in isolation titled Anna. I think her film fittingly reflects the mood of many us living under the pandemic.

Phenakistoscope Workshop

My Intro to Global Animation class did a DIY phenakistoscope workshop this week. My students seemed to enjoy it and they made some creative phenakistoscopes as well.

Global Video Game Cultures’ Strong Museum of Play Field Trip

This semester, I had the opportunity to take my Global Video Game Cultures seminar to visit the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play. I had actually planned this trip since last year, but due to unforeseen circumstances I did not get a chance to teach the seminar until this semester. So this time I made sure my class get a chance to visit the Museum as I believe it would provide my students with a hands-on experience to explore the broad and global history of video games and learn about the cultures that emerge from and around their worldwide circulation.

As part of the class trip, we went to see the World Video Game Hall of Fame, experienced the eGame Revolution interactive exhibit, perused some of the rare archives on Atari, and went for a behind the scene tour to see the Center’s collection storage rooms. All in all, I think my students enjoyed the trip and it was also recently covered by the HWS Update.

PUBG cosplay

A short commentary on “fatwa haram” for PUBG in Indonesia

PUBG cosplay

“PUBG – PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds”by timz2011 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the midst of returning to the States, I wrote a short commentary for The Conversation about a religious edict (fatwa) stating a popular game, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), haram in Indonesia. This edict has been issued by the Ulema Consultative Council (MPU) in Aceh. My commentary frames this edict as a case of moral panic surrounding video games circulation in the country. It is also a call for a deeper study of Indonesian video game cultures and their history. If you can read Indonesian, here is the link to the article!

Traces of Play Pt. 2: Game Prime 2019

This post is about contemporary game culture and industry in Indonesia rather than its early history.

Last weekend, I went to Game Prime 2019. It’s the biggest annual game exhibition in Indonesia which gathers both major and indie game studios in the country. The event is mainly sponsored by the Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf), government-funded agency that supports the development of creative economy in the country. This is actually my first time attending Game Prime even though the event itself has been held for three years now.

In general, it was a good experience. I learned how rapidly the game industry in Indonesia has evolved in the last ten years. I still remember when I was first researching Nusantara Online game back in 2011, the industry was still sporadic. Now, not only are there many game studios flourishing all over the country, some of them have actually marketed their game internationally, such as Agate Studio with its premium game, Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story, or Digital Happiness’s DreadOut.

I also observed that a significant number of game studios in Indonesia have developed games in B2B (Business to Business) model, meaning they do not publish their games to the public, only for exhibition or their client’s events/programs. For instance, Agate Studio, perhaps the biggest studio that participates in the event given the number of their booths (they had 4 separate booths), made two games (Smart Bike and City Defender) for AXA Indonesia and one for Telkom (Sky Cage). I believe this strategy is pretty common among Indonesian developers since they need to keep their business sustainable.

Agate’s Smart Bike game for AXA

On the other hand, I also saw (and played) several games made as side projects or prototypes by a small collective of developers or a single individual. I actually find some of these projects much more interesting than games made with B2B model. Because, instead of operating as gimmicky spectacle with little inventiveness in gameplay or narrative development, some of these alpha or beta versions displayed more creative excitement. For instance, I was interested in the game Kirana, an action RPG game developed by Kawarna Studio as a side project. The game uses the history of Singosari during the Mongol invasion as its background narrative and has a female protagonist. There is also Loveless–developed by only one person under the name of Teamless–which is a study of player agency in the form hybrid and non-linear dating sims/adventure game. The game’s visual actually reminded me of Undertale.

Teamless’s Loveless demo

Of course there’s a sobering realization in me that many of these alpha or beta version games perhaps will never see the light of day given the developers’ limited resources and market demand. But, it’s still stimulating to see how these studios exhibited their passion project.

Another thing that I observed from the event is how Indonesian mainstream video game industry has started to think forward about platform and game ecosystem. In this case, Telkom Indonesia—the nation’s largest telecommunication service provider—is perhaps the main support engine for this development. The company has supported Gameqoo, a Stadia-like cloud gaming service, offering subscription-based gaming option for Indonesians. According to one of Gameqoo’s staff that I talked to, the company is also planning to bundle its service with Telkom’s Indihome cable and internet services in the near future. In addition to this, Telkom has also partnered with Agate Studio to create an ecosystem for local games called Oolean, which eventually will also be connected to Gameqoo. It looks like the semi state-owned company is now really serious in supporting domestic game industry, which is a good thing considering its half-hearted backing in the past.

At the indie level, a small game developer, Ginvo Studio, is also hoping to create a sustainable ecosystem for their games, which mainly consist of tabloid newsgames about all things viral in Indonesian internetscape. They actually have quite an ambitious plan to develop and sustain their platform by planning to release one newsgame every week, and I am actually interested in this studio and their games for my research. I will probably contact them in the near future.

Ginvo Studio’s promotional material for their tabloid newsgames’ ecosystem, Gemvi

I also noticed that some companies also utilize real digital currency reward system to attract gamers to use their platform, such as India-based Mobile Premiere League and Amcore’s game Jump,Bunn. I think this is related to the aggressive strategy of Indonesia’s digital wallet services that I wrote in my previous post and the rapid popularity of competitive gaming/e-sports.

In terms of genre, survival horror game seems to be on the rise besides RPG. I believe this happens because of international achievement of DreadOut. Many studios aspire to achieve the same level of success, if not more, with their games. For instance, Storytale Studios has Pamali and Ozysoft has Pulang: Insanity. Personally, I am interested in the development of 4Happy Studio’s game WhoIsHe: Let Me Out. It has the vibe of What Remains of Edith Finch, which I really like, and a touch of Indonesian culture. It’s also developed by a studio not from the island of Java (4Happy Studio is from Batam island), which is refreshing. I hope the studio will complete the game in the near future.

4Happy’s WhoIsHe: Let Me Out demo

Game Prime also had a section for old arcade games, which brought back nostalgic memories in me (especially of Galaga and Street Fighter!).

It also has a separate section for tabletop/board games. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to visit each booth and talk with the game developers/creators, but I bought two board games, Circus Politicus and Bluffing Billionaires, that I plan on using in my Global Video Game Cultures seminar this fall.

Bluffing Billionaires and Circus Politicus

All in all, I am glad that I went to the event and I hope I will get a chance to go to the next one.

Indonesia’s “digital wallet” ecosystem and socio-technical change

Having to go back to my home country, Indonesia, twice in a span of a year have made me realize a significant change in many aspects of life here. Of course changes are expected when you left your country for more than a decade, so I already anticipated that. But one of the most vexing changes for me is this somewhat aggressive shift in the country towards the so-called “cashless society,” where you are made to use digital wallet services even though you do not really want to. Perhaps a couple of personal anecdotes will illustrate why I feel this way:

One time my family and I drove to a mall in Bandung, and this was during the first couple of weeks of our stay. When I tried to get into the paid parking lot (parking is rarely free in my country, especially at malls) I was struck with the sign: “No cash payment, [a digital wallet brand] only.” I asked the parking assistant about the sign and he confirmed it, I couldn’t pay with cash to park there. He told me that I could buy the digital wallet card from him though. I declined his offer and backed my car out of that mall because I did not want to use unfamiliar (at the time) transaction method and also felt that I was forced to use it.

This experience happened after I learned that there is no more cash payment option for toll roads. You have to use digital wallet service to pay for your toll fee, although in this case you have several options to choose. I am not sure if this is a nation-wide practice, but I assume it is. Later on, I also learned that at some malls when you buy food in their food courts you cannot pay with cash nor credit/debit card anymore. You can only use either a certain brand of digital wallet or the mall’s own service. I was annoyed that when I wanted to buy a bottle of water because my son was thirsty, I could not do it right away. I had to opt to use one of the services.

At this point, perhaps you might call me a whiner because digital wallet services are a convenient method for economic transaction. Or perhaps you might think that I am anti-progress because this turn to cashless society is Indonesia’s step towards realizing the so-called “Indonesia 4.0,” embracing economist Klaus Schwab’s conception of “Industrial Revolution 4.0.” However, I want to point out that there is a difference between forced “progress” and a participatory one. And I also think that Indonesians need to discuss socio-cultural implications of this aggressive shift towards cashless society from multiple perspectives, not just from the discourse of technopreneurship.

Even traditional food stalls such as this one are conditioned to employ digital wallet method for transaction

Here, I am reminded of the classic works by Langdon Winner and Neil Postman. Postman, in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, argued that any technological innovation never has one-sided effect, and that we have to simultaneously consider what new technologies can do and undo to society. Meanwhile, Winner in his seminal essay “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” explains the political nature of technologies in everyday settings and how the creation and operation of any technology require specific social arrangements. Winner’s most cited example, the height of bridges on the Long Island Expressway in New York, is the one that resonates with me the most in the case of Indonesia’s digital wallet ecosystem. Similar to Winner’s Long Island Expressway example, where its “master builder” Robert Moses deliberately designed the height of the bridges to discourage the presence of buses and consequently limiting access of racial minorities and low-income groups to Jones Beach, the adoption/enforcement of digital wallet services at some malls or toll roads in Indonesia is a case where technological architectures are being used as a method that constrains certain behavior (cash transaction) while encouraging another (digital wallet transaction).

Unlike the Long Island bridges though, it’s not racist ideology that motivates this “modality of constraint,” to borrow Lawrence Lessig’s term, but it’s market force. In my preliminary research, I learned that Indonesia is a huge untapped market for e-money market. According to one Google/GfK digital wallet study in 2018, despite the rapid growth of digital finance apps since 2010, only fewer than 40% of Indonesians with smartphones have used financial services apps. Even among the minority of e-money app users, only 11% are average daily users according to the same study. So it is understandable that these financial companies are being aggressive in making Indonesians use their service, even if it means forcing them through strategies such as the paid parking scheme that I experienced.

In my opinion, the aggressive strategies of some digital wallet services in Indonesia is somewhat an extension of what Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook have been doing to the internet ecosystem (in fact Facebook will soon join the digital wallet business with their cryptocurrency product, Libra). Some websites today limit how you sign up for their services. They only let you sign up either using Facebook or Google, with no other options (or a tiny-looking option that users often overlook). This strategy has now found its way out of the pure digital realm of the internet and into the daily lives of Indonesians. With the growth of digital wallet/e-money services and their strategies, I am guessing that many Indonesians will probably experience (or perhaps are already experiencing) a divided and sometime exclusive “merchant ecosystem,” where you can only use a certain type of service and not the others.

Of course for many Indonesians, this may be a good thing. Especially with various shopping discounts offered by these digital wallet companies these days. However, we need to also seriously consider how new technologies disentangle the structures of everyday life in the country. There are several lines of inquiry that I think we can consider. For instance, how the digital wallet ecosystem affects the role of malls as commercially-constructed public sphere in the country, or how digital literacy (or a lack thereof)—as related to age, class, and gender—influences the adoption of digital wallet services, or how data mining and tracking used in digital wallet services to build “a single customer view”—as one digital wallet service is planning to do—will shape the life of Indonesians in the future. These are the conversations that should also take place alongside the celebratory remark about cashless society.

Student Project-Intro to Global Animation 2019

After a long hiatus due to unexpected life events, I have decided to revive this personal website. Hopefully this time it will be updated regularly.

To kick off, I would like to share (with permission) these two student stop motion projects from my Intro to Global Animation course that I just taught last spring.

I have been teaching this course for three years now and have to admit that the last iteration may be the most enjoyable to teach yet. I had a good group of students who were very active and attentive. In general, they also did a good job with their final project. The two projects that I’m featuring here are the ones that stand out for me the most.

The first project is called Media Pressures. It’s a critique of our contemporary social media culture and its attention economy. This one is technically the most polished compared to the other projects in the class although I made comment to the group that their stop motion would be much better with music soundtrack.

The second one is called Old Town Road. Story-wise, it plays with the usual western movie trope. What I like about this stop motion project is because the students who made this tried to apply what they have learned about the concepts of “limited animation” and “cartoon physics,” and I think they quite nailed it. Plus, it’s also sort of a reimagination of Lil Nas X’s song 🙂

PS. I had to upload my students’ videos to Youtube since Vimeo is (still) blocked in my home country, hence the downgraded quality. Once I am back in the States, I will switch them with the version on Vimeo.

Tracing Indonesian Videogames History pt. 1

This is the first post related to my current research project on Indonesian videogames history (Disclaimer: thoughts are still scattered and disjointed):

As Inaya Rakhmani and Hikmat Darmawan (2015: 250) assert in their chapter about videogames culture in Indonesia, the exact history of videogames in the country is difficult to trace due to a variety of reasons. Archival awareness was not, and perhaps still not, high among Indonesians, especially for things considered trivial such as videogames. There aren’t really any exact record of what videogame titles first introduced to the country, or when. Statistical data on gaming is almost nonexistent, particularly during the early years. So, most narratives about Indonesian videogames history depend on the memories of people who participated or are still participating in the culture, i.e. gamers. Based on this collective memory, Rakhmani and Darmawan suggest that the development of videogames in Indonesia can be traced as far back as the mid-1980s.

While I cherish Rakhmani and Darmawan’s oral history/interview approach, I am interested in examining the scarcity of record about Indonesian videogames history, specially by means of popular distribution. My goal is not to provide the ultimate history of Indonesian videogames (that would be a rather foolish and impossible task), but to offer glimpses of what videogames discourse looked like (if there was such a thing) back in the early days. I think by doing this type of research, it will enrich our understanding of contemporary videogames culture in the country.

So, the first thing I did is to look for popular periodicals that were around during the estimated period that Rakhmani and Darmawan suggest. In this case, I examined two periodicals, Intisari and Variasi Putra Indonesia, from late 70s to late 80s. These two periodicals are by no means the representation of Indonesian popular culture back then. They are just ones among many, and they are, in this case, accessible to me.

Perusing these two periodicals, the first thing that I stumbled upon is this Graffiti jeans ad:

Graffiti Jeans Ad, Variasi Putra Indonesia, No. 397 (24-30 July 1981)

 

Graffiti Jeans Ad, Intisari, No. 217 (August 1981)

The ads show three hip-looking youths (by 80s fashion standard), posing next to what looks like a coin-op pinball machine. I am intrigued by the fashion and the machine. Well, mostly the machine.

The machine maybe just a prop for the ad. Yet, associating the aura of “hipness” that the ad promotes, the pinball machine may also suggest that it was part of a trendy youth culture back then. This may not be surprising if we connect it to the history of videogames in the US, especially coin-operated arcade. Coin-operated machines were already part of popular culture dating back to the Victorian-era amusements like the Kinetoscope.

However, 1981 was the heyday of videogame arcades in the US. As Carly A. Kocurek (2015) points out, “[b]y the early 1980s, mainstream media outlets from Life magazine to the New York Times were reporting on the youth trend, and arcades had become mainstays in shopping malls, strip malls, and small-town storefronts across the Unites States” (2). If we were to align the youth trend in the US with that in Indonesia, then the more appropriate background prop for the Graffiti ad would be a Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) arcade machine, or perhaps Sea Wolf (Midway, 1976). But what we see here is a much older coin-op machine (by the US standard).

Then perhaps videogame arcades were not yet popular in Indonesia back then (I rather doubt it). Perhaps arcades were still a novelty for upper-middle class youth as Rakhmani and Darmawan suggest. Yet, if they were a novelty, where did they play them? At home? (I also doubt it)

It is also interesting to note that this ad was the only non-game ad that used game-related background (at least in the two periodicals). And the appearance of this ad is very rare. From 1979 to 1990, it only showed up twice in Variasi Putra and once in Intisari (there are of course other Graffiti Jeans ads, but they did not use the pinball machine as a background prop anymore).

 

Works Cited:

Kocurek, Carly A. Coin-Operated Americans (Univ. Minnesota Press, 2015)

Rakhmani, Inaya and Hikmat Darmawan. “Indonesia.” In Mark J. P. Wolf (Ed.). Video Games Around the World (The MIT Press, 2015)

nutshell encounter

Archives in Between Recap

This post is a follow up from my last post about the digital humanities workshop I organized for AAS 2017. Well, I ended up not attending the workshop itself because of my visa situation (what a bummer!). But, the workshop itself went pretty well (thankfully!). The University of Rochester’s Re-Envisioning Japan (REJ) team (Joanne Bernardi, Nora Dimmock, and Tracy Stuber) and the Lafayette College’s East Asia Image Collection team (Paul Barclay) successfully facilitated the workshop.

The workshop itself comprised four activities:

  1. Introduction of the two projects
  2. Hands-on activities: Object Encounters, Twenty Questions with an Object, and Metadata and Tagging
  3. Concluding comments (recapping projects)
  4. Q & A

Here are some of the photos from the workshop (courtesy of Nora Dimmock):

And here is the link to the REJ team’s powerpoint presentation.

 

Archives in Between

This coming March, I will be organizing a collaborative digital humanities workshop: Archives in Between-Digital Humanities and Material Culture in East Asian Studies, at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Chicago .

This workshop is part of an on-going collaboration that my CLIR fellow cohort, Michaela Kelly, and I are initiating.

It will feature two large-scale, on-going digital humanities projects at the University of Rochester and Lafayette College: Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture and the East Asia Image Collection. Both are faculty-library collaborations offering innovative pathways for East Asian Studies scholarship, research, and teaching.

So, if you are planning to be at the conference, do come to our workshop session!

Here’s the link to the workshop flier that contains more info, including the location and time: link

 

 

 

Global Video Games: Cultures, Aesthetics, Politics

Kicking off 2017 by drafting syllabus for my spring course on global video game cultures. Excited to teach this course for the third time.

I did a major overhaul of the material since there are several new works that came out recently, which I think should be included in the syllabus, like Philip Penix-Tadsen’s Cultural Code, Mia Consalvo’s Atari to Zelda, and Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins’s edited volume, Debugging Game History.

You can check the draft here. Do share your feedback with me if you have any!

RE-ENVISIONING JAPAN: Recuperating Ephemeral Histories through Collaborative Digital Curation, DH Pedagogy, and Web-based Publication

Last month I went with Joanne Bernardi, a professor of Japanese here at University of Rochester, and Nora Dimmock, my supervisor, to Bucknell University Digital Scholarship Conference.

It was by far the best conference I went to this year. The keynote talks by Tressie McMillan Cottom and Safiya Noble were great and really relevant to our current digitally-mediated culture (I will try to write a short review of their talks in a different post). We also went to see several engaging panels, among them were compelling presentations about digital humanities projects done by undergraduates at Lafayette College and Gettysburg College.

Our team gave a presentation on Re-Envisioning Japan (REJ) project, a collaborative project that we are involved in. As the principal researcher, Joanne gave a brief background history about the project, which is a public archive of digital surrogates of an original physical collection of travel and educational ephemera about Japan during the early to mid 20th century, and its significance in terms of research and pedagogy. She also explained the challenges that have driven the project’s initiative to migrate the contents from WordPress to Omeka platform. Then Nora explained how the project has opened the way for close collaboration between library and faculty here at U of R. The project has not only bridged the gap between scholarship and teaching, but also introduced new critical practices in the library in terms of participatory curation, metadata structure, technology framework, and team-building. Following up Nora’s explanation, I explained my roles as a newly-joined member of the project, which include collaborating with the team to create a sustainable and transportable data model that will create a much stronger archive platform both in the front-end and the back-end, and creating an interactive timeline for REJ‘s film collection. At the end of our presentation, Joanne gave a brief showcase of two things that the REJ group is currently working on as “future directions” of the project: “Encounters” and “Routes.” The group has developed the “Encounters” since the previous CLIR Postdoc fellow was here. It is basically an interactive tool that will enable users of the REJ archive to dynamically curate the objects in the collection in a real-time. Meanwhile, “Routes” will be a multimodal web-publishing platform embedded in the REJ archive that will accommodate academic scholarship about the collection. These two tools will reflect REJ‘s main objective: to create an online archival platform that is organic, creative, and collaborative.

You can check out our presentation slide deck here. And if you want to see REJ’s “old” look, click here.

Student Project – Intro to Global Animation

Last Fall, I designed and taught a new course called Introduction to Global Animation for the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. It was a rewarding experience for both my students and I. We explored the history and practices of animation not only in the centers of global animation industry such as US and Japan, but also in places like Russia, China, and Iran. Through various case studies, we considered how local, national, regional, and transnational perspectives contribute to the historical trajectory of animation at a global scale.

In addition, to couple the writing assignments and exams, I asked the students to do a final group project creating a short stop motion animation covering one of the topics that we studied throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, many of them admitted that they gain a deeper knowledge about different aspects of global animation culture and that they really enjoyed the process of creating stop motion animation. I can’t say it enough that I am really proud of the overall students’ engagement in this class. Below is one of the best projects from the class, which discusses the historical role of women in animation industry. The title of the project is “The Dream of Feminine Aesthetic in Animation.” Enjoy!

The Dream of Feminine Aesthetic in Animation-Student Project

The Dream of Feminine Aesthetic in Animation-Student Project from iskandar zulkarnain on Vimeo.

‘Programming’ the Archipelago Featured in My Campus Library Newsletter

So, recently I was featured in my campus library e-newsletter. I was actually humbled by the invitation and thought it was nice that someone thought my project is worth-featuring. So here is the link to the text version (there is also a link to the video interview).

Inspiring Quote # 1

“Once a technology is admitted, it plays out its hand; it does what it is designed to do. Our task is to understand what that design is–that is to say, when we admit a new technology to the culture, we must do so with our eyes wide open.”

– Neil Postman, Technopoly

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (danah boyd) – Collaborative Book Engagement

Around five or six months ago I volunteered to co-direct a collaborative book review project as a HASTAC scholar. It’s a kind of “crowdsourced” book reviews where you invite people to review sections of a book instead of the whole thing. This is actually the second project of its kind launched by HASTAC (I also participated in the first one). This time we choose It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens by danah boyd. It’s a really good book if you want to learn about youth engagement with social media from the perspectives of the youth themselves, and it’s highly readable. I’d have still recommended it even if I didn’t get involved in this project.

In this project, I partner up with another HASTAC scholar Megan Farnel and we work together with the HASTAC Scholars Director, Fiona Barnett. And couple days ago we finally launched the finished version of this project. We’ve gotten twenty-two people writing nineteen reviews and one pedagogical resources (excluding Megan who also wrote the review for the book’s intro). They all come from various academic backgrounds and have taken diverse approaches in writing their reviews.

For me, to be involved in this project is a really rewarding experience, both personally and professionally. And I’m really happy with how it turns out.

You can check the project here!

Theorizing the Web 2014: A Personal Report

So this is my attempt to re-boost my adventure in the academic blogosphere. I really am having a hard time maintaining my personal blog this year despite my aspiration to do so due to several interrupting life events. Now that I have relieved myself from most of my commitments as a grad student (it’s about time!) and that life is less stressful at the moment, I figure I need to start revamping this blog again as a space for my personal ramblings and musings about media technologies.

So as my first post-hiatus post I choose to write about my experience attending the latest Theorizing the Web (TtW) conference in Brooklyn, NY, last April. I’ve heard about this conference for a while during my involvement as HASTAC Scholar so I was excited when the organizers of TtW accepted my presentation abstract on videogames and nationalism in Indonesia. This is the kind of conference that I really want to go to learn about critical perspectives about the internet and/or digital media cultures both from academics and tech journalists/insiders. Plus, it’s a “pay-what-you-can” conference, so no worries about those steep conference registration and membership fees. And I can’t say I’m not glad that I finally participated in it. It was a really enriching two-day experience.

In this conference, I presented my paper in a really cool panel titled “Consensual Hallucination: Fantasy in a Public Life.” But I’m not going to talk solely about my panel in this post. Rather, I’m going to highlight several presentations that caught my attention during the conference. On the first day I had to move back and forth in between “Tales from the Script: Infrastructures and Design” and “World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web” panels. This is always my problem whenever I attend conferences and I’m sure I’m not the only one. There are always interesting panels that happen at the same time!

From the “Tales from the Script” panel I learned about the idea of end-users as networks in Karen Levy’s presentation The Myth of the End User. In the presentation, Levy reminded us that rather than thinking of end-users as individuals we have to start to think of them as a constellation of power relations and institutional entanglements, mediated through technologies. With this framework, we will be able to see and think about the role of technological infrastructures and social motivations (like mistrust, gossips, etc) in the promotion/distribution of not only technological products but also things like Nexafed and fertilizers. I missed seeing David Peter Simon’s The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex presentation, but still enjoyed Jason Q. Ng’s, Tolu Odumosu’s, and Dalia Othman’s presentations in the “World Wide Web(s)” panel that look at various aspects of digital cultures in China, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Middle East. They discussed topics like censorship, infrastructure, and activism in non-western contexts, which I think is really important to talk about to avoid the tendency of western-centric attitude in talking about new media technologies.

In the next session, I sat on the “Screenplay: Nation, Ideologies, and the Games They Play” panel. This is the panel right before mine and it’s about video games, so I sat through the whole thing. There were three presenters in this panel, Cameron Kunzelman, Daniel Joseph, and Catherine Goodfellow. They all brought up interesting arguments about videogame cultures, but the one that’s more memorable to me was Goodfellow’s presentation about Russian gaming cultures and its relation to videogame ideology in Eastern Europe. To certain extent, I felt like we should’ve been in the same panel since we’re talking about videogames and national identities.

In my panel, Lauren Burr presented a paper on the creative misuse of social media with examples like @TheoryBear twitter bot account (which I also follow by the way!) and the #OccupyMLA “netprov” movement. There was also Amy Papaelias and Aaron Knochel who gave a presentation on a collaborative project they’re doing together to explore the notion of “transformative play,” especially on the issue of race. The last one was Molly Sauter who talked about the concepts of “civic fiction” and “bridge blogger” along with their complexities, giving an example of the elaborative hoax of Tom MacMaster with his fictional “A Gay Girl in Damascus” weblog that has caused quite a backlash after gaining mainstream media attention. Despite my wish to be in a videogame panel, I think the TtW organizer did a great job putting us in the same panel.

There we two plenary sessions on the first day of TtW: “Sex Work and the Web” and “Theorizing Big Data,” but the highlight of my first day was the second one with Zeynep Tufecki, Kate Crawford, Janet Vertesi, and Winter Mason as the panelists. Tufecki talked about the limits of big data analysis that relies too much on algorithmic method and data visualization. For her, which I totally agree, we should resist looking at only one method of big data and start to closely read it. With this kind of approach we could see where culture comes in big data analysis, or in her words this is when big data turns into “ground data.” She uses the example of twitter feed activity during Gezi Park protests in Turkey, where people just drop hashtag because the topic is so dominant. Meanwhile, Crawford discussed about the affects of big data, talking things like the Squeaky Dolphin surveillance program and the surveillance anxiety, where anxiety affects not only those being surveiled but also those who surveil. Her talk reminded me of Foucault’s elaboration of Bentham’s panopticon concept and disciplinary society. Vertesi’s presentation is similar to that of Crawford’s but with a more concrete and personal case, i.e. her own experience. She talked about how it was so hard for her to hide her pregnancy from the eyes of big data both online and offline and pointed out how pregnant women are actually incredible values for marketers. You could also read her post-conference interview here. Mason’s talk was actually the most controversial in the plenary session since he represented the side of big data, or Facebook to be exact. His presentation on targeted advertising drew quite a stir among the audience, both offline and online. I could observe how some if not many people among the audience (myself included!) criticized his take on big data and this was also apparent during the Q&A session. Despite my disagreement with his take, I have to admit that Mason’s presence in the panel was necessary to create a dialogue (however intense) between big data industries and people like me who are concerned with issues like surveillance and targeted marketing strategies and I applaud the TtW organizers for the decision. I also can’t imagine how the audience would react to his talk had they already been aware about Facebook’s emotional contagion experiment at that time.

On the second day, I regretted that I did not get to see Patrick Sharbaugh’s presentation on meme culture and civic engagement in Vietnam at the first panel on internet memes, “Gone Viral: All Watched Over by Memes of Loving Grace” because I woke up late. I was also late to see Joel Penney’s presentation on memes and the persuasive political power of the web. The only full presentation I saw in this panel was Robert Horning’s talk on the idea of the “viral self” and “post-authentic” culture, which was quite intriguing for me.

The second panel I went to was “Streetview: Space, Place, and Geography,” which was pretty interesting. The highlights of this panel include Mathias Crawford’s elaboration on the concept of “procedural communities,” which I love to learn more since in his presentation he juxtaposed it against Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Jay Springett’s exploration of the “stacks” and “stacktivism” as geopolitically dominant power.

I had to skip the next two sessions because I had to meet my friends from Indonesia who I have not seen for years. But I was glad I was not late for the last keynote session, “Race and Social Media.” I was excited to see Lisa Nakamura, André Brock, Jenna Wortham, Latoya Peterson, and Ayesha Siddiqi presenting various cases, from personal to general, around the issues of race and social media such as the #NotYourAsianSidekick on Twitter. Nakamura’s astute statement in this panel that algorithm is ideology in executable form became my fave quote from this conference. I think it really hits the spot and represents the spirit of TtW (IMHO) as one of the venues where we try to disentangle the somewhat mystifying operation of this executable ideology.

 

P.S. Most of my reports of the panels here are based on my scribbles during the conference. So do excuse me of glossing over. I also learned that the TtW organizers have uploaded the complete video archive of the conference panels on Youtube, so I do encourage you to watch them through this link here so that you get to see the whole conference panels (I’m actually going to watch all the panels I have missed!).

My first peer-reviewed article is out

So finally my article is out! It’s published by SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia. I’m quite happy with it. It’s my first peer-reviewed publication adventure (and I hope it’s not gonna be the last). It’s about an Indonesian MMORPG called Nusantara Online and I discuss it to propose what I call “playable nationalism,” one mode of expressing nationalism in digital forms. I know my discussion is not foolproof to criticism, especially since this is an early version of one of my dissertation chapters. But I hope with it being published I could get constructive criticism from its readers to be able to improve it. If you’re interested in reading it, it’s available as free download here. The other articles in the issue are also interesting, so if you have access to the journal from your academic institution you should check them out! (I know I will)

1980s: The age of useless tinkering

this post is originally from my old and abandoned blog:

i was reading the annals of the new york academy of sciences on computer culture in 1984 and this statement by a bell labs researcher reminds me how much has changed in the practice of computing:
“quite a few years i prided myself in the building of an early home-brew computer. people always asked me what it was good for. they still do. i have consistently answered that it is not good for anything. it does not control the heating of my house, nor does it balance my checkbook. it does not keep the inventory of our kitchen supplies or the names on our Christmas card list. no, i just like having it. i like to make it work, to write systems and applications programs that serve no purpose whatsoever.”

 

Spirit of technological progressivism

So couple days ago, I came across this image from the twitter feed of Alan Liu:

pencil

 

At first I thought it’s a funny advertisement from the past. But then, when I think again, the spirit of this ad still echoes in the time we live right now. We still see ads for technological gimmicks like this fridge that can tweet:

TweetFridge

 

It makes me wonder that maybe we always have a blind optimism that technology is the inevitable agent for human progress. Especially with ‘there’s an app for that’ anthem in the computing industry.

On a funny note, when my son saw the calculating pencil ad, he told me that he wanted them. Maybe he needed it to work on his mathematical exercises 🙂

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