Center for Science and the Imagination | CSI Skill Tree: Mass Effect: Andromeda with Souvik Mukherjee and Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay @imagineASU | Uploaded May 2024 | Updated October 2024, 1 hour ago.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we consider themes and dynamics of colonialism in video games, focusing on “Mass Effect: Andromeda” (2017), an interplanetary space opera developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts.
Watch other CSI Skill Tree episodes: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN5muqvLAASr3XmjnUyXUnnShIPzlTfkp
About our special guests:
Souvik Mukherjee is an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, in Calcutta, India. Souvik is the author of three books: “Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books”; “Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back,” and most recently, “Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations.” He is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism. In 2019, he was named a distinguished scholar by the Digital Games Research Association, or DiGRA, and was a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow in 2022. Learn more at cssscal.org/faculty_souvik.php.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is an associate professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, and the principal investigator and lead for CoFUTURES, an international research group on global futures funded by the European Research Council. He runs the Holodeck games research lab at the University of Oslo, and he co-founded the research collective Theory from the Margins. He is the co-editor of the books “Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories” and “The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms,” which explores visions of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and histories. He joined us on a previous episode of CSI Skill Tree to discuss “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri”: youtu.be/OhAiz4t3gEc. Learn more at https://cofutures.org.
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more and sign up for email updates about publications, events, and projects at https://csi.asu.edu.
CSI Skill Tree is a series that examines and celebrates how video games envision possible futures, build rich and thought-provoking worlds, and engage people as active participants in unfolding and interpreting stories. In this episode, we consider themes and dynamics of colonialism in video games, focusing on “Mass Effect: Andromeda” (2017), an interplanetary space opera developed by Bioware and published by Electronic Arts.
Watch other CSI Skill Tree episodes: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN5muqvLAASr3XmjnUyXUnnShIPzlTfkp
About our special guests:
Souvik Mukherjee is an assistant professor in Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, in Calcutta, India. Souvik is the author of three books: “Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books”; “Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back,” and most recently, “Videogames in the Indian Subcontinent: Development, Culture(s) and Representations.” He is currently working on a book project on Indian board games and colonialism. In 2019, he was named a distinguished scholar by the Digital Games Research Association, or DiGRA, and was a Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow in 2022. Learn more at cssscal.org/faculty_souvik.php.
Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is an associate professor in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, and the principal investigator and lead for CoFUTURES, an international research group on global futures funded by the European Research Council. He runs the Holodeck games research lab at the University of Oslo, and he co-founded the research collective Theory from the Margins. He is the co-editor of the books “Indian Genre Fiction: Pasts and Future Histories” and “The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms,” which explores visions of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and histories. He joined us on a previous episode of CSI Skill Tree to discuss “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri”: youtu.be/OhAiz4t3gEc. Learn more at https://cofutures.org.
The Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University engages in research, outreach and radical collaborations to reinvent our relationship with the future. From writers, artists, and teachers to scientists, engineers, and technologists, we bring diverse intellectual practices together to create visions of the future that are inspiring, inclusive, and imaginative. Learn more and sign up for email updates about publications, events, and projects at https://csi.asu.edu.
