Why Does India Need Storytellers to Build its Gaming Future?

This story was authored by Dr Vijay Sekhon, Associate Professor and Lead, Interaction Design and Co-lead, Transdisciplinary Design, Anant National University And Dhruv Jani, Designer-in-Residence, School of Design, Anant National University

Games are an incredible medium for experiencing virtual worlds and understanding what it means to exist within them. They offer a natural way into navigating avatars and the abstract digital systems that we increasingly spend more of our lives in. 

The ability to play with complex media and networked computers has become a necessary way of making sense of imagined spaces and our online presence. From simulations to interactive storytelling, from database fiction to experimental theatre, game cultures and game-making have become a universal mode of expression and belonging on the Internet. 

Playing with such virtual recreations of real-world systems in games can also help us better understand how different aspects of our lives are interconnected.

Games Can Bring Stories and Cultural Traditions to Life

Audiences no longer simply consume stories from a distance. Modern viewers, readers and gamers actively influence and shape the stories they love, and immerse themselves in them. Moving fluidly between media and kinds of conversation, they create and sustain expansive worldbuilding projects and shared universes of fiction. The most generous of such use the capacity of games to hold many meanings and many forms side by side. They encourage a varied capacity for play and foster deep communities with a shared love for the medium. 

A game is a set of rules that players inhabit, so it can do more than depict a tale or a tradition. It can invite us to play inside that tradition’s logic. A game can hold opposing perspectives side by side and ask the player to move between them. It can tell a story the way the myths and epics were once told, changing with each player and each telling. There are opportunities to develop games that can delve deep into histories of places and practices, intermingle cultures and produce new aesthetics; games that celebrate diverse literary forms and expand upon our rich philosophical and rhetorical traditions. 

Why India Needs Local and Sustainable Game Cultures

Such games do not need to be vast to be convincing. Small games made by local collectives, built on modest hardware, played in classrooms, museums and town squares, and shared freely rather than locked into platforms, can carry these ideas into spaces games have not yet breached. Encouraging the creation of such work means finding new avenues, new forms and new audiences for stories that are yet to be explored in game form.

This insistence on hyper-local games in a distributed form is a critical part of building sustainable game cultures. Our expansive virtual lives have a cost. The computing power behind game worlds and simulations demands building ever-larger infrastructure that pushes us towards alarming environmental and cultural precarity. The hardware that powers video games is also at the heart of the servers that automate labour, build war machines and surveillance systems. And the tools that fuel unbridled imagination also make the world far more volatile. For a country like India, none of this is a future projection or a distant abstraction. It is already being felt in floods and falling water tables, in social turmoil, and in a crippling dependence on opaque, automated systems of control. 

We stand on a razor’s edge, between the promise of new ways to exist in virtual worlds and the catastrophic potential of the systems that make them possible. This is why we urgently need games to recognize what it means to live on a precarious planet, and not overwhelm us with false savior narratives. We need games to delve into stories that reveal the intricate, everyday negotiations of building local and communal resilience. 

Here, the immersive quality of the medium is not exploited to lure people away from reality, but instead to imagine new and hopeful ways of making and living together, even across impossible barriers. 

Making Space for Diverse Voices in Indian Gaming

Such games are just starting to open up the medium to democratic expression, not just in our country but across several communities long without resources for making and sharing digital games. We are seeing a spread of free, open-source tools and engines for making games, much wider participation by people from the margins of gaming communities and a joyful willingness to create new works of interactive delight. 

With this influx, there is now a real demand for representation and equitable ownership, greater transparency in the process of building games and a growing language for thinking critically about games. For countries like India, this has meant room for outsider voices to thrive. People are translating their lived experiences into games: diaspora stories, community projects, games that negotiate belonging, identity and gender and those difficult-to-express ideas that are better explored in simulations. 

Indian Game Developers Need to Look Beyond Technology

In their current state, the largest games and studios remain tied to narrow ways of telling stories about our lives, reluctant to move beyond colonial power fantasies and conquest narratives. An approach that puts technique first will always bend to these pressures of popularity, scale and computing power, placing banal stories at the centre of a medium that remains unwelcoming to many of us. 

India possesses an extraordinarily rich cultural history of dialogue and debate, a legacy that has historically welcomed disagreement, allowed new ideas to take root and enabled diverse perspectives to flourish.  Can we learn to retain these even in new mediums? Or will we give in to the pull of technology-driven progress; a progress that sees itself as inevitable but cannot be sustained? We need to think carefully about which parts of our legacy, which modern realities and which future aspirations we choose to focus on when we share our stories with the world. 

Storytelling Can Preserve India's Cultural Identity

This narrative exploration is particularly visible among a maturing generation of game developers and creators. Rather than relying solely on global tropes, modern creators are turning inward, drawing inspiration from local languages and idioms, regional folklore and rich mythological traditions. They are not mining them as exotic material, but rather weaving their game worlds into the texture of the communities they seek to represent. 

So, while coders and other technical specialists remain the backbone of the creation of digital games, chasing technological sophistication does little to reduce the huge cost of producing and hosting these virtual simulations. This, more often than not, simply repeats the loop of creating banal games that have little to say about the world we find ourselves confronting. 

What we desperately need is to occupy this medium differently: not just with imaginative new stories, but also with imaginative new ways of making and celebrating them. That means re-occupying the digital spaces that shape our lives with delightful and distinctive expressions of community and hope.  

After all, it is the vital duty of storytellers to capture the uniqueness of place, culture and custom and bring such subtle nuances to the fore. Without this deliberate act of cultural preservation through art, we risk dissolving all human identity into a giant, featureless, homogeneous pool. Storytelling is the essential force that keeps our world vibrant, varied and distinct.