[Journal Club] Gaming Between Pleasure and Guilt: The Gaming Subculture and Cultural Dissonance of Young Indian Men

TEXT: Snodgrass, J. G., Dengah, H. F., Upadhyay, C., Else, R. J., & Polzer, E. (2021). Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture: A Norm Incongruity "Cultural Dissonance" Approach to Internet Gaming Pleasure and Distress. Current Anthropology, 62(6), 771–797.

"The moment of feeling guilty while doing what you love" arrives more often than one might think. Especially when what you have to do and what you want to do do not coincide, and when the latter is regarded as socially undesirable. For young gamers who have grown up loving games, this ambivalence is probably no stranger. As fandom, punk, and otaku cultures once were, games too are, for some, a cultural practice that offers the most intense pleasure and sense of belonging. Yet that very pleasure also collides with the social prejudice surrounding games, breeding anxiety and guilt. In this way games have, at the intersection where pleasure and stigma, belonging and anxiety cross, conversely driven an even stronger addictive immersion—and as a result have formed a subculture that shares norms and an identity all its own.

The paper this piece takes up sets out to unpack the gaming subculture of young men in emerging adulthood (the transitional stage between childhood and adulthood) in the small city of Udaipur, in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Bearing the title "Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture," it explores how online game play offers Udaipur's youth an alternative subcultural identity as gamers, and why they experience games so addictively amid pleasure and guilt.

Background and the Cultural Dissonance Perspective

This study sets out to view the phenomenon of "game addiction" through the lens of medical anthropology, which studies a particular social group's illness or suffering within a cultural and social context beyond the merely physical. To explain the ambivalent phenomenon of Udaipur's youth becoming ever more fervently immersed in games even while wracked by anxiety about the future, the researchers draw in part on the concepts of the medical anthropologist Dressler. Dressler held that what determines an individual's physical and mental health includes not only material factors such as income, nutrition, and access to care, but also the relationship between the cultural values an individual holds and the social expectations surrounding them. To this end he developed the concept of cultural consonance, which shows how closely an individual matches the beliefs and behaviors grounded in their own cultural values to the cultural model shared in society. That is, the concept of cultural consonance shows that an individual's health can vary according to "whether they can actually realize the cultural life they believe to be important."

So what becomes of an individual placed in a situation where cultural consonance fails to occur—where the values they hold important and society's expectations diverge? For this, the researchers add to cultural consonance the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance (the tendency of an individual to suffer when they cannot remove the incompatibility between their beliefs and attitudes), developing the perspective of cultural dissonance. Through this concept, the study seeks to read Udaipur youth's gaming subculture not as the addiction or antisocial avoidance of a simple pathologizing discourse, but as a psychosocial negotiation that tries to minimize the conflict between online and offline life.

Next, it is worth noting the sociocultural background of Udaipur, India, against which this piece is set. The study's participants are Indian men in their early twenties, either in their final year of high school or attending university. According to the authors, young Indian men up to the age of twenty-five are basically regarded as student-brahmacharya—occupying a stage of preparation for becoming the head of a household. Most of Udaipur's youth marry through arranged marriage, and until then they live under pressure to acquire both the means to provide as a head of household and the ability to secure a good bride. Most, even after marriage, live with their parents or, even if they move out, stay close to them and are positioned to support them. In such a society, where the role of the (prospective) head of household is strongly imprinted, the act of enjoying games is readily defined as an "addiction" that easily diminishes a young man's reputation and jeopardizes his future career or marriage prospects.

Meanwhile, Udaipur is a place where access to social media and games is reasonably well established, thanks to the spread of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, and internet technology. Many participants could therefore enjoy online games like Counter-Strike without difficulty in offline spaces such as gaming zones. A "gaming zone" is an in-person gaming café in India, similar to a Korean PC bang, equipped with high-spec networks and PC hardware. Most participants, though middle class or owning a PC at home, nonetheless visited these places together with friends, playing while interacting with online users through text and voice chat. Most young gamers showed themselves struggling to become "true gamers," clocking in at the gaming zone daily—to the point that some treated every Sunday as "Full Rush day" and played all day long.

Methods

To analyze its subject, the study combined at least three research methods. First, to explore the process by which Udaipur's young men become immersed in games and acquire a gamer identity, the researchers conducted an ethnography accompanied by participant observation over six weeks across three gaming zones. The regular players—generally about twelve to fifteen at each zone—became the focus, with observation accompanied by field notes carried out in the morning and evening for at least an hour and a half and at most about three hours. Second, they conducted informal interviews with the youth who regularly appeared at the gaming zones. The interviews sought to cover not only their accounts of gaming and gamer identity but also the pressures of career and marriage they faced in life.

Third, through a survey they identified the four core components of the "true gamer" identity model these youth pursued, and sought to grasp how these components connected to their positive and negative gaming experiences. The four core components are the four elements revealed in the ethnography described below (having close gamer friends, a sense of connection to the global gamer community, the dream of becoming a pro gamer, and a sense of belonging to the gamer subculture), while positive and negative gaming experiences were measured using a 21-item instrument following Dressler's methodology. In this process the researchers hypothesized that the closer Udaipur's youth felt to the true-gamer identity, the more they could experience not only positive gaming experiences (pleasure) but also negative ones (the distress that accompanies it). Finally, performing a measurement based on the three analyses above, they derived a cultural model of the positive and negative gaming held by Udaipur's youth and sought to analyze how it aligned with individual health outcomes.

Ethnographic Methods and Findings

Everybody Knows Everybody

First, India's gaming zones had settled in as powerful spaces of friendship for Udaipur's youth. They came at first in search of a good environment for gaming, but over time they became so close as to be like family, each knowing everyone else. They spend more than half their time at the gaming zone not as players but as "spectators." While spectating they shout instructions and commands to teammates or online friends, and during breaks they drink tea or smoke and discuss the next strategy.

At the gaming zone they interact by cursing, shouting loudly, teasing, and playfully hitting one another—behaviors not easily tolerated in public spaces until now. Most of them write their names on their cigarettes with a marker and keep them in the gaming-zone owner's drawer. The cigarettes, tea, and snacks traded at the gaming zone likewise serve as an informal "currency of friendship."

The Global Gamer Community

Udaipur's youth formed friendships and communicated with diverse players around the world through the global game platform Steam. Most participants played Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and the global network they encountered there made them transcend their national and religious identities. A guildmate living in Iraq might come into the game and relay the news that fighting in his country had quieted down; they might naturally team up and play with Pakistani Muslims. For as long as they played here, they were simply "gamers," and other affiliations such as caste, religion, or geography were secondary.

Participants enjoyed using Hinglish (the Indian English of native Hindi speakers) during play to display their command of English and their fluency in game knowledge. The points at which they distinguished themselves as "true gamers" from others were their passion for gaming, the English ability that created a global sense of belonging, and a particular pattern of consumption (symbolized by cigarettes, energy drinks, and junk food) by which they could define themselves as "addicts."

Dreams of the Digital Age

What benefits did participants feel games offered? They answered that gaming gave them passion, motivation, and a competitive drive that could help them in life. They took particular pleasure in the process of honing and steadily improving their skills. To this end they regularly watched live broadcasts of matches between famous teams, and stocked up on cigarettes and energy drinks as essentials for staying awake long hours. The gaming-zone owners, too, knew their passion and even organized local matches between zones.

Intriguingly, most of Udaipur's "serious gamer" youth dreamed of debuting as pro gamers. Indian pro esports teams—like the "Indian Wolves," who became famous for playing Dota 2—were a great inspiration for such dreams. To go pro is to be able to do what you love and, on top of that, to win the very title of "true gamer" you had so wanted. Yet at the same time they were partly aware that, coming from a small city with almost no support for games and an unstable internet, such a dream was unrealistic.

Gaming as Subcultural Escape

As mentioned earlier, at the gaming zone Udaipur's youth gained a kind of freedom not tolerated elsewhere in society. At the gaming zone alone, every activity was permitted—screaming, fighting, cursing, behaving roughly, and eating and drinking whatever they wanted. Many participants therefore located the pleasure of games in being able to flee the real world, forget their problems, and pass the time. Such answers are grounded in a perception of reality in which most youth feel they "have no future," as Udaipur's unemployment rate soars sky-high. Good jobs are hard to come by, marriage is in any case already foreordained through a parent-arranged match, and once they marry and become heads of household, their gaming life ends entirely.

The space of the gaming zone, therefore, functioned as a kind of magic circle—temporarily separated from social norms—able to offer participants liberation or a cultural alternative from the oppressive circumstances they wished to flee. And precisely for that reason, paradoxically, this space remained importantly connected to the real-world spaces and concerns that participants would have to face again.

Social Moral Panic: The Discourse of "Technological Addiction" and Emotional Distress

As noted earlier, in the Hindu discourse of brahmacharya, games are regarded as an act that can ruin an important period of life-preparation. To play games during the time when men ought to be controlling and managing their "animal" impulses as much as possible before entering the household is, in itself, an unrestrained waste of time. (This was a view internalized even by the researchers, who had lived in Udaipur for decades; one researcher of traditional Brahmin background felt discomfort, during the participant-observation stage, at participants' unrestrained cursing and chain-smoking.)

Moreover, the context in which games are condemned in Udaipur society is bound up, beyond the role norms of the male head of household, with a "(generational) condemnation of technology." Some of Udaipur's older generation remarked that the internet exerts a harmful influence on Indian society and that ninety percent of youth are mired in pointless internet addiction. This connects, too, with established perceptions of gender norms: that the internet draws young men and women into inappropriate relationships and, by copying Western lifestyles, has induced a trend of premarital sex and rape. The examples of proper internet use this society offered were limited to using the internet to prepare for certification exams and to learn a future trade.

Surrounded by such social perceptions, most participants recognized that they were, in some form, addicted to games. Many had played a hundred hours straight without eating or sleeping, and many failed to keep up their studies—their grades falling because of games, or being barred from class for failing to meet attendance requirements. Even as they constantly explained their gaming with "we just have to do it" (karna to hai), they were quick and unhesitating to label themselves and their friends addicts or time-wasters.

Survey and Measurement Analysis

First, descriptive statistical analysis of the survey sample showed that respondents' positive gaming experiences were slightly higher than their negative ones. They felt an adequate sense of social belonging and support through the online community, but this did not mean they felt greatly lonely in their offline lives either.

At the hypothesis-testing stage, the researchers examined how the four elements of the true-gamer behavioral model—having close gamer friends (H1), a sense of connection to the global gamer community (H2), the dream of becoming a pro gamer (H3), and a sense of belonging to the gamer subculture (H4)—connected to positive and negative gaming experiences. Among respondents, the stronger the first three variables, the more positive gaming experiences were reported. By contrast, a sense of belonging to the gamer subculture emerged more strongly as negative gaming experiences increased. This shows that the pleasure of gaming respondents feel also derives from belonging to a gamer counterculture that departs from the norms of mainstream Indian society.

The most important point in this analysis is that, overall, positive and negative gaming experiences were strongly positively correlated. The majority of players with high positive play experiences had, at the same time, high negative play experiences, and each variable that drove positive play experiences was linked to higher negative gaming experiences. That is, in the gaming experience of Udaipur's young men, the two are not fundamentally opposed experiences but closely interrelated.

Conclusion

In this way, the ambivalent feelings of Udaipur's youth toward game play show that the positivity and negativity of games are not opposed perspectives, and at the same time can be read as the two faces of the "cultural dissonance" these youth experience within the gamer subculture and mainstream society. The incompatibility of the two worlds—subculture and mainstream society—is the very mechanism that splits participants' identity and consciousness in two. That they acknowledge the inherent risks even as they play shows that they are not simply isolated and sunk in the world of games, but always play on the premise of a connection to the outside world.

At the same time, the researchers explain that Udaipur youth's signifying their own gaming as "addiction" is yet another way of minimizing the cognitive and emotional dissonance they face. Between the true-gamer identity and the performance of the masculinized normative role expected of them as part of Indian society, by signifying the former as a temporary addiction, they raise their future life to a relatively superior position and seek to minimize as much as possible the suffering, stress, and discordant sensations they undergo in the present.

Finally, the researchers hold that the analysis of Udaipur youth's gaming experience as subculture expands the analytical lens on gamers. Until now, the problem of game addiction has been treated from a biomedical perspective as a matter of mental illness like drug or gambling addiction, or, when treated from a cultural perspective, as something like a triggering mechanism of a "moral panic" that fosters consumerism and threatens the morality of youth. But the authors argue that the very situation in which this study's participants insist "I am dangerously addicted to online games myself" renders the social-panic theory of gaming addiction incomplete.

In Closing

The authors' "cultural dissonance" perspective on Udaipur's youth shows, I think, the researchers' intellectual effort not to judge a particular subcultural group on the basis of a resistance-versus-submission binary. The culture these youth displayed at the gaming zone does in part oppose the norms of dominant masculinity that mainstream Indian society assumes, but at the same time they also partly internalize the stigma of being social outcasts, or "losers," who have strayed from the mainstream. Their doubled situation—neither fully assimilated into mainstream norms nor fully escaping them—manifests as the act of demoting their present position to that of a temporary addict (since they will give up gaming life in the future anyway).

That said, since this is fundamentally a piece focused on how to discuss the problem of game addiction in a direction different from existing cultural approaches, it remains a limitation that the analysis of the oppositional character of Udaipur youth's subculture is not deepened. In that respect, the observation of Lesley Jo Weaver, one of the paper's principal reviewers, is highly meaningful. What the paper should have discussed further is a deeper analysis: beyond youth simply acknowledging the fact of their addiction, what they actually think about this dissonance and how concretely they try to resolve it, and further, what relationship the gamer community ultimately forms with India's patriarchal society. In particular, inasmuch as this paper recalls Paul Willis's Learning to Labour in various contexts, there is a need to take up in earnest how their cultural dissonance reproduces—or escapes—the broad norms of male-centeredness and machismo operating in the larger cultural context of Indian society.