Video Games and the Global South

"Video Games and the Global South" is an edited volume that argues game studies has long marginalized the Global South, treating it as a technological periphery despite rich and distinct histories of game production and consumption across Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, South and East Asia, and Australia. Drawing on decolonial and postcolonial theory, the contributors insist that games must be understood through local economic, political, and cultural conditions, including trade embargoes, copied hardware, piracy, state censorship, and state efforts to build national industries. Rather than adopting center-periphery binaries, the volume proposes "border thinking" and attention to heterogeneous local contexts.

The chapters cover a wide range of cases. They examine India's import-driven but growing sector and the persistence of digital divides and caste-based exclusion; Chile, Mexico, and the United States as sites of art games and military critique; Brazilian "Bomba Patch" modding as a form of epistemic disobedience; Indigenous and Mexican cultural representation in games; Middle Eastern industry constraints and player perceptions of stereotypes; China's shift from moral panic to state-backed esports professionalization; South African and Peruvian online communities marked by racism and LAN-café sociality; and Argentina's "Game On!" exhibition series. Mobile and informal access, including piracy, public gaming venues, and peer-to-peer sharing, recurs as a central mechanism of access and, in the authors' view, a democratizing force.

Methodologically, the volume relies heavily on ethnography, interviews, auto-ethnography, social media analysis, and textual and design analysis, with data points that are often small in scale or drawn from partial sources. Its geographic scope is broad, though it concentrates on Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Its overall conclusion is that games from and about the Global South reveal how cultural representation, labor, and access are shaped by power relations, and that these relations can be negotiated and reclaimed by the communities depicted.