Indian Gaming Zones as Oppositional Subculture: A Norm Incongruity "Cultural Dissonance" Approach to Internet Gaming Pleasure and Distress.

SUBCULTURES; VIDEO gambling; COGNITIVE dissonance; PARTICIPANT observation

On the basis of participant observation and questionnaire data, we consider the cultural shaping of video gaming pleasure and distress in face-to-face gaming centers in Udaipur, Rajasthan, India. We analyze how and why young adult Indian gamers experience their play as both deeply satisfying and dangerously addictive. To explain this dual consciousness, we join the concept of cultural consonance (individuals' relative consistency with their culture) with the theory of cognitive dissonance (the experience of distress when individuals are unable to eliminate incompatibilities in conflicting beliefs). Specifically, we consider Udaipuri gamers' attempts to minimize distress arising from their commitment to conflicting online and offline cultural norms related to "true gamer" identity and to local marriage and career expectations—an example of what we call cultural dissonance. We highlight how our cultural dissonance account of mental well-being is enhanced by examining intersections of local cultures with global media, attending to the stigma felt by members of oppositional subcultures, and relying on ethnography. More generally, we illustrate how formal cultural norm accounts of health developed in psychological anthropology benefit by engaging broader cultural anthropological theory and method, which refines consonance and dissonance health explanations in the context of social complexity. This paper, then, is an illustration of the power of mixing mathematical and ethnographic methods to understand human experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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