Defending player freedoms in hostile political environments: a view from the Indian game scene

PUBG is one of the most prominent multiplayer games and is played by 200 million individuals across the world, including enormous popularity in India. The diversity within the PUBG community is something that is often cherished. I personally have met many great individuals with a great sense of humour and personality while playing the game myself and, even though like in every other game, PUBG has a problem with hackers, trolls, etc., in most of my game sessions, I often stumble across some very interesting people; I believe this is the reason why I always keep coming back. As an Indian citizen myself, it is actually hard to find young people in my own community who do not play PUBG. Considering this, I can certainly comprehend why PUBG was voted as the most popular game in India both in 2018 and 2019.

While things may look fine and dandy for the thriving Indian gaming community, there has recently been a noticeable change in the level of anxiety players feel while playing PUBG. No, it is not because of a new update filled with glitches; it is something much more sinister. In late 2018, one of the largest states in India, Gujarat, banned people from playing PUBG.

This is rather odd, because the game is still widely available in most of the app stores in the Indian market and the ban is enforced only on people who are playing the game. While Indian society is riddled with issues that demand serious attention, perplexing reports started to emerge of players being targeted and arrested for just playing PUBG.

These reports were followed by a tweet from the local police of a major city in India (Ahmedabad) where the game is banned, informing the populace of the consequences of playing PUBG in public and reminding them of it being an arrestable offense. Another city police department in the state of Gujarat went as far as urging the general public to act as informants when they come across individuals playing this game. To add to all of this, one of the chief ministers of another state in India, Goa, labelled the game as “demon in every home”. 

While I believe that video game addiction, just like any other forms of addiction, can lead to destructive behaviours, I personally do not believe in blanket bans of most things, let alone arresting players for the very benign and innocent act of playing a game in public.  On top of this, I feel that the way the Indian government deals with this issue was with utmost callousness and insensitivity. Reading some of the reports on how these arrests were made and the mental trauma these supposed “criminals” went through is heart wrenching. Some of the interviews conducted by Buzzfeed India describe the harrowing experiences in detail of those who were detained by the police, how their phones were seized, and the public humiliation they went through.

What is often missed by the media reports is that these interactions with police not only have a psychological effect on those who went through this ordeal, but the Indian administrative system is also very punitive when it comes to those with a “police record”. While it is hard to know if those individuals now have a record under their name or not, it is certain that any police detention in India can lead up to difficulty in obtaining things such as a passport, obtaining a criminal record certificate, a background check, etc.  So these individuals, who were just playing a game in public, not only had to face physical and mental humiliation, combined with the distress of being detained against their will, but most likely they may also have to face long-term administrative ramifications due to their “crime”. This latter aspect is a slower and less-visible story, and so it is less commonly followed-up on in the media.

After a widespread outcry on social media and the courts being involved in this matter, the ban on PUBG was lifted in many cities of the state of Gujarat. The sad part about this whole series of events was that there were no strong reactions from the game developers or the gaming studios that actually make these games. During the height of this phase of arrests and detentions, not many voices from the game development community were heard. In fact, Techradar India criticized the government for taking disproportionate actions against players when in their words, they could be “tracking down actual criminals”. PUBG mobile later released a statement expressing their surprise about the detentions and showing their willingness to work with the Indian government to limit gameplay times for individual players; an issue which was touted as one the causes for these bans in the first place. In their statement, they avoided mentions of some of the prolific cases of students playing PUBG and their abhorrent treatment while being detained at the police stations.

I propose that this deafening silence from the game developer community is something that should end with immediate effect. As the world becomes more politically tumultuous, it is unlikely that the game development community will walk away unscathed and amid the possibility of potential assaults on player freedoms, banning of games, and even legal actions against game development companies, there is a need for studios, indie or major, to speak out against these incidents in unison by forming an alliance of some sorts that will defend not only player freedoms but will also not refrain from getting political if that is what the situation calls for.

Leaders, both developers and executives, in the gaming sector will need to be involved. While the creative director of Ubisoft, Terry Spier, has said that they will refrain from making any political statements, attacks on their own games and player base might change that for good. It is reasonable for people in the business of producing video games and entertaining the world to not engage in politics, however, looking at the PUBG mobile debacle in India, I can say there is a certain level of risk in being complacent when it comes to governments and their policies towards the game dev community.

While being apolitical might be appealing to certain distributers and game development studios, there is a strong need for comradery in the game development community whenever incidents similar to those in India occur. At the time of writing, the IGDA currently lists no chapter in India, but even if this did exist we need to question whether any organisation which frequently works with volunteers would have the capacity to operate at the level of national politics. Such an organisation will likely require more time than regional volunteers can provide, and the games industry needs to accept that its size requires international and well-funded representation.

A strengthened alliance of game development studios of all sizes could go a long way when governments take unreasonable actions against not just players but also against the games themselves and their makers. Whether this alliance can take the form of a union, a committee or a simple group, that is up to the game developers to decide; however, such an alliance will serve as a channel for dissent whenever governments around the world take unwarranted and over-the-top actions against developers or gaming communities, as seen in India.

This also means that the gaming industry would have to be much more political than it is now, and accept that this perhaps-unwanted responsibility is already on its shoulders. It will also ensure that we are better prepared to respond to political events that can affect the entire gaming community in a substantial way. As seen in India, sometimes these political choices have the potential to change the course of people’s whole lives only for the act of playing a game.