Indofuturism Dasein Game Lab is introducing worldbuilding as a formal discipline in India, bringing together game designers, architects, artists, and researchers to create futures rooted in South Asian history, ecology, folklore, and lived experience.
In recent years, India’s still-nascent gaming industry has grown at a staggering pace, with releases such as ‘Thekku Island’, ‘Raji: An Ancient Epic’, and ‘Mukti’. But according to the founders of Indofuturism Dasein Game Lab — a Kolkata-based production company — Indian game developers still face a fundamental creative bottleneck: too many games still rely on borrowed worlds.
Co-founded by narrative and game design director Srijandeep Kumar Das and architect, design futurist, worldbuilder and level designer Bharat Raj Thukral, the Lab is attempting to change that by introducing worldbuilding as a formal discipline within Indian design education. The initiative’s implications extend far beyond the development of games. The Lab is building a framework for students, artists, architects, coders, psychologists, researchers, and creative practitioners to collaboratively imagine futures rooted in South Asian histories, ecologies, and lived realities.
Across the world, futurist movements have long sought to imagine alternative futures. While the original Futurist movement emerged in early 20th-century Italy and celebrated technology, industrialisation, and radical breaks with the past, later Futurist traditions evolved into vehicles for cultural reclamation and political imagination. Movements such as Afrofuturism, Indigenous Futurisms, Arabfuturism, and Dalit Futurism have used speculative storytelling to recover marginalised histories and envision futures grounded in local realities. Indofuturism situates itself within this broader cultural and intellectual lineage. Rather than treating progress as technological acceleration alone, it seeks to weave together heritage, ecology, indigenous knowledge systems, and contemporary innovation to imagine distinctly South Asian futures.
“Many Indian games are technically proficient, but they often imitate aesthetics and structures borrowed from elsewhere. We want to move from being consumers of culture to becoming creators of cultural stories.”Srijandeep Kumar Das, co-founder, Indofuturism Dasein Game Lab
The Lab’s first major intervention was a Worldbuilding Hackathon held at the Ecole Intuit Lab Kolkata, in collaboration with Techno India University, as part of IFD Game Lab’s ‘Worldbuilding Asia’ initiative. Bringing together students and professionals from diverse disciplines, the event challenged participants to create original intellectual properties (IPs) inspired by South Asian landscapes, folklore, ecology, and collective memory.
The winning project from the inaugural worldbuilding hackathon was ‘Nishir Daak’, a psychological horror game by Arnob Gun, Deepanjaan Basak, Madhubani Kora, Sanchita Dasgupta, Shreedatri Paul, Tripti Shaw, and Ankush Mukherjee. Set in domains inspired by real-world locations across Kolkata and the rest of Bengal — including Howrah Railway Station, the East Kolkata Wetlands, the Sundarbans mangroves — and the folkloric realm of Dreaming, ’Nishir Daak’ draws from Bengali ghost stories, urban legends, and memories. The game follows a young boy, Deep, as he navigates grief and memory in the world of dreaming.
While ‘Nishir Daak’ is currently in pre-production at IFD Game Lab, Das and Thukral are collaborating with individuals and institutions, including Kaya Rao Shetty, who is designing the global pedagogy and curriculum at IFD Game Lab; Ishan Ray, Head of Academics, Ecole Intuit Lab Kolkata; Professor Ujjwal K Chowdhury, Head of Creative Strategy at Techno India University; and Meghdut Roy Chowdhury, CIO at Techno India University to expand its workshops and hackathons across India, introducing worldbuilding into design, architecture, engineering, and fashion institutions beyond game development.
As climate anxiety, cultural erasure, and technological acceleration reshape life, the Lab offers a new way of seeing the world — imagining better futures that begin with paying closer attention to where we already are.
Follow @indofuturism.in to learn more about the initiative.
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