Stealth and a Transnational Politics of Location in Videogames

This article addresses Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan’s call for transnational feminist research that makes visible “the material conditions that structure women’s lives in diverse locations” (17). The author argues that videogames can contribute to feminist scholarship by creating virtual spaces that simulate how a transnational politics of location plays out on women’s bodies. This article provides a spatial analysis of three videogames, République, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Alien: Isolation, to show how the games’ procedures can persuade audiences to empathize with the surveillance and precarity of women’s bodies in real-life transnational experiences. While the games focus on “stealth,” the limitations provided by the gameplay simulate the different ways in which women’s bodies must “sneak” around national identities and rules, thus showing the ways in which a transnational politics of location creates “contradictory positions. . . [for women who] inhibit unitary identities” (Grewal and Kaplan 7)

A Peer-reviewed Newspaper About_ Datafied Research

An examination of the implications of datafication for research: to investigate and propose actions that push against the limits of today’s pervasive quantification of life, work, and play. Publication resulting from research workshop at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, organised in collaboration with School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, and transmediale festival of art and digital culture, Berlin

Broken Theory

Broken Theory is a jettisoned collection of fragmentary writing, collected and collaged by new media artist, writer, musician, and theorist Alan Sondheim. Folding theoretical musings, text experiments, and personal confessions into a single textual flow, it examines the somatic foundations of philosophical theory and theorizing, discussing their relationships to the writer and body, and to the phenomenology of failure and fragility of philosophy’s production. Writing remains writing, undercuts and corrects itself, is always superseded, always produced within an untoward and bespoke silo – not as an inconceivable last word, but instead a broken contribution to philosophical thinking. The book is based on fragmentation and collapse, displacing annihilation and wandering towards a form of “roiling” within which the text teeters on the verge of disintegration. In other words, the writing develops momentary scaffoldings – writing shored up by the very mechanisms that threaten its disappearance. Broken Theory is prefaced by a text from Maria Damon and followed by an extensive interview with art historian Ryan Whyte

Practicing Work, Perfecting Play: League of Legends and the Sentimental Education of E-Sports

A growing force in the culture of digital games fandom, e-sports represents the profes-sionalization of digital games play. This thesis examines League of Legends, a prominent game in e-sports, to understand the relationship between e-sports and the ideology of neoliberal economics. Using Clifford Geertz’s descriptions of sentimental education as a model, the author argues that League of Legends and other e-sports texts create an environment where neoliberal economic values can be practiced and explored in a meaningful space. The game as text, the culture of e-sports fandom, and the e-sports broadcasting industry are all examined to reveal the ways that e-sports fosters a space to both practice neoliberal values and potentially question them through the conflicting values of Web culture. Understanding the ways e-sports texts and e-sports culture explore ideological values allows for the potential to create more recursive e-sports texts that question this ideology in the future

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production

Digital games as simulations

Conference paper and presentation slide

The potential of America's Army, the video game as civilian-military public sphere

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2004.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143).The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. Specifically, this study is concerned with the potential of the America's Army gamespace as a US civilian-military public sphere of the Information Age, as assessed through Habermasian theories of democratic communication. Interview fieldwork was carried out in several America's Army game communities including those of real-life military personnel, Christian Evangelicals, and hackers. The political activities of these exceptional game communities are considered for the ways they escape and transcend current critical theories of Internet-based public spheres.by Zhan Li.S.M

Postdigital interfaces and the aesthetics of recruitment

This paper analyses reconfigurations of play in emergent digital materialities of game design. It extends recent work examining dimensions of hybridity in playful products by turning attention to interfaces, practices and spaces, rather than devices. We argue that the concept of hybrid play relies on predefining clear and distinct digital or material entities that then enter into hybrid situations. Drawing on concepts of the ‘interface’ and ‘postdigital’, we argue the distribution of computing devices creates difficulties for such presuppositions. Instead, we propose thinking these situations through an ‘aesthetic of recruitment’ that is able to accommodate the intensive entanglements and inherent openness of both the social and technical in postdigital play