ABSTRACT
How may we place gaming in the larger media landscape of India? How may we expand television studies through an exploration of gaming? This chapter seeks to address these questions through a case study of the League of Extraordinary Gamers in Bengaluru, India, and through observations and surveys of young television audiences through four phases of fieldwork spanning 2013–17. Bengaluru, one of the first cities to be digitized, provides a rich site for the exploration of gaming as an extreme version of the individualized mediated experience. The theoretical concept of Third space is used here to explore the process by which users leverage their connectivities and technology options to produce a “place” they can inhabit meaningfully and powerfully, subverting lived realities which offer, oftentimes, limited mobility and even threats to personal safety. The chapter extends television studies by strongly arguing for analysis of the lifeworlds created through gaming. Thinking through gaming centers and streaming programming as Third space advances our understanding of confluences between global and local by urging us to think through new configurations of space as well as the reordering of imagination they engender and the translation of such imaginations into agency.
