Transnational Play makes a case for approaching gameplay as a global
industry and set of practices that also includes diverse participation from
players and developers located within the global South, in nations outside
of the First World. Such participation includes gameplay in cafés, games
for regional and global causes like environmentalism, piracy and cheats,
localization, urban playful art in Latin America, and the development
of culturally unique mobile games. This book offers a reorientation of
perspective on global play, while still acknowledging geographically
distributed socioeconomic, racial, gender, and other inequities. Over
the course of the inquiry, which includes a chapter dedicated to the
cartography of the mobile augmented reality game Pokémon Go, I develop
a theoretical line of argument critically informed by gender studies and
intersectionality, post-colonialism, geopolitics, and game studies. This
book looks at who develops, localizes, and consumes games, problematizing
play as a diverse and contested transnational domain.