MAGIC Speaker Series welcomes Souvik Mukherjee

Talk title: Playing Games with Karma: Indian Board Games as a Commentary on LifeAbstract: Largely unknown to Game Studies, Indian board-games dating back from centuries ago have informed notions of game mechanics and play as a socio-culturally important phenomenon for quite a while now. The playful often engages with serious aspects of life, religion and philosophy through the ways in which play represents the complexity of karma. Moving away from the recent (Western) notions of karma as a simplified morality-bound cause-effect relationship, karma as it was originally defined in Indic philosophies is much more difficult to perceive. This paper will look at the early Indian board-game, Gyan Chaupar, its colonial adaptation into the oversimplified Snakes and Ladders (or Chutes and Rockets) and how a complex ludic representation of karma has changed to the current (and arguably, less richer) notion of it in Game Studies. Following this, an attempt will be made to link the complexity of Gyan Chaupar to the multi-telic structures of videogames.**Members of the audience will be requested to join our speaker in a game of Gyan Chaupar following the talk**Bio: Mukherjee is a game researcher with an interest in videogames as storytelling media, temporality, philosophy of videogames and videogame paratexts. Mukherjee is also interested in the digital humanities, e-learning, early modern literature and literary theory. Mukherjee has published and presented conference papers on a range of topics in Game Studies as well as on Renaissance and Romantic Literature.Mukherjee is an Assistant Professor in English Literature at Presidency University, Kolkata and is interested in exploring possibilities of developing Game Studies and Digital Humanities in India and is eager to collaborate with colleagues in India and abroad.This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the School of Interactive Games and Media