The différance engine: videogames as deconstructive spacetime

Abstract

The purpose here is to intervene within some dominant strands of videogame scholarship and propose a more problematic relation to our object. The two dominant tendencies taken-up here represent what has come to be self-styled as a media studies 2.0 model, over and against a supposedly previously dominant (and retroactivated as outmoded) 1.0. Proposed in opposition to these somewhat sweeping positions will be a deconstructive model which, while disagreeing with these theoretical ‘algorithms’, would not believe itself to be leading a charge toward any notionally more thoroughgoingly circumnavigating 3.0 account. Specifically, while the 2.0 account proposes a “new” active first-person Performative framework versus an “old” third-person indicative Constative, we would recommend a reworked iterative-Performative as propounded in the works of Derrida and Butler