Ludo Club

Intersectional Complexity Between Players and Non-Players in Bhutan

This paper by Hitoshi Fujiwara examines the gaming culture of Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom of roughly 0.8 million people, focusing on the tensions and interactions between players and non-players.

• Bhutan's gaming culture grew mainly through mobile phones: smartphones spread from around 2013 and penetrated the market between 2015 and 2016, while console, arcade and PC gaming had been too expensive for most Bhutanese before then.
• PUBG Mobile (Tencent, 2018) was reported as the most popular game in Bhutan from about 2019, with thousands of players forming Facebook groups that led to the founding of the Bhutan Mobile Gaming Association and its membership in the Bhutan Olympics Committee.
• Between 2019 and 2020, traditional media broadly covered PUBG Mobile negatively, citing addiction and violence, and the government temporarily banned downloads of the game, which players strongly opposed and which pushed player–non-player tensions to a breaking point.