Imlisanen Jamir
At the NBCC convention hall in Kohima on August 28, Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio inaugurated the Tech X Gaming Expo by telling Nagaland’s young people that they need not leave the state to find their future. Buried inside that reassurance is an argument worth pulling apart, because the digital world Rio was describing arrived in the first place as a promise of departure rather than a promise of staying.
The internet, and the gaming culture that grew alongside it, sold itself for two decades as the one territory a person could enter without a passport, an unowned sea where the usual authorities of geography and hierarchy did not quite reach. What happened in Kohima was the opposite gesture, performed in the language of generosity: a government formally adopting that territory as an arm of its own economic planning, under the heading of Viksit Bharat 2047, with an eighteen-thousand-square-foot STPI centre and a proposed Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence standing in as the new infrastructure of belonging.
The clearest evidence of this sits in the same speech that announced it. Rio described a memorandum of understanding worth more than one hundred million rupees with Google for school education as a milestone in the state’s development. The pairing is instructive, because the platform companies that once represented an external, faintly suspect force pressing in on the open commons of the internet are now the state’s chosen partner in shaping how its children learn. Sovereignty over that space is not being lost to Google so much as handed to it, formally and with a signing ceremony, as evidence of progress rather than as its quiet erosion.
What follows from this handover is a second, related transformation, which is that gaming stops being the thing you do instead of working and becomes another category of work altogether. Rio’s list of the futures on offer, game developers, streamers, commentators, data analysts, event managers, describes an entire economy built out of what used to be recreation. The expo’s stated purpose was never to produce gamers so much as to produce a labour pipeline wearing a gamer’s clothing.
Having built that pipeline, the government then performed the second half of the transaction, which is to hand the risk of it back to the individual: the infrastructure is the state’s contribution, Rio said, but the responsibility to seize the opportunity belongs to the young person alone. That arrangement, generous at the point of construction and unforgiving at the point of failure, is a familiar shape in governance, and it recurs here dressed in the vocabulary of digital opportunity rather than the vocabulary of welfare.
None of this required force or concealment, which is what makes it worth noticing. The expo opened with a pastor’s invocation and was chaired by the state’s Commissioner and Secretary for School Education, and the entire event ran through institutional channels from beginning to end. This stands in contrast to the informal, peer-built networks, the pirated software, the modded games, the LAN parties, through which gaming culture actually spread in its formative years.
Rio’s central claim, that young people need not leave Nagaland because opportunity can now be delivered to them, deserves to be read against that history rather than only against its own stated intentions. A frontier that once promised escape from where you were born is being replaced by a state-sponsored simulation of everywhere else, offered on the condition that you stay exactly where you are.
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