My research explores the expressive affordances of videogames and other new media forms, looking at how they are mobilised to articulate, interrogate and enact understandings of subjectivity, selfhood and belonging.
This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being tran... more This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.
Chapters
1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity
2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data
3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces
5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence
6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces
7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames, 2024
In the age of Twitch, watching other people play videogames has become commonplace . However, rea... more In the age of Twitch, watching other people play videogames has become commonplace . However, reading about other people playing videogames remains a niche pursuit. And yet, as I would insist, firsthand accounts of digital gameplay can be entertaining, illuminating, and profoundly thought- provoking. In what follows, I analyze a generically diverse selection of texts, all of which recount specific individuals’ experiences of digital play, and propose some ways to read them.
The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drone... more The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash with NPC memes accusing liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. In mid-October, with midterm elections looming in the US, Twitter banned over 1000 NPC roleplay accounts created by supporters of Donald Trump, citing concerns over disinformation. This event was much discussed both within right-wing subcultural spaces and by mainstream media outlets, serving as an occasion to reassess the political effects of digital media in general and reactionary memes in particular. Here we use a combination of computational analysis and theoretically informed close reading to trace the NPC meme...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2022
For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of... more For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholars in this field have shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human act...
IO Interactive’s Hitman is a series rife with satirical social commentary. Whether we are configu... more IO Interactive’s Hitman is a series rife with satirical social commentary. Whether we are configuring an exquisitely ironic fate for a corrupt politician or disguising ourselves as a clown in order to boobytrap a mobster’s barbecue, Hitman specialises in turning death into a punchline. But should murder be a laughing matter? And don’t ‘slapstick-stealth-sandboxes’ like Untitled Goose Game make Hitman’s humour look rather glib and grisly? This chapter uses Hitman to explore how attempts at humour and accusations of humourlessness have helped to redraw the boundaries of gamer culture in the wake of #GamerGate. Analysing the series’ approach to comedy in relation to the work of theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, it seeks to shed light on the dynamics of gamer humour/lessness.
Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure speci... more Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more referentially dense than many walking sims. Accommodating giant spiders, Weimar sexologists, messageboard trolls and quotations from Roman poetry, Nikolai’s unorthodox spins on the ‘archival adventure’ reflect her interest in queer and trans history and her commitment to interrogating discourses of purity, progress and redemption. Reviewing critical discussions of the walking sim alongside queer, trans and decolonial perspectives on archives, identity and subjectification, the article argues that while walking sims have often been praised for telling emotionally engaging stories, in Nikolai’s hands the form assumes different function: that of reckoning with history and exploring subjectivity.
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, 2018
In ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’, Rob Gallagher takes up the issue of narrata... more In ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’, Rob Gallagher takes up the issue of narratability, after situated narrative theory, to consider how different video games become narratable for different players and kinds of play. For Gallagher gaming is a situated time-bound practice, which demands we address the terms on which different games become narratable for different players. In this essay Gallagher historically situates the ludology/narratology founding myth of game studies and insists instead on understanding contemporary gaming culture as ‘part of a networked culture of data capitalism, in which our interactions with digital devices, whether playful or professional, have become a source of profit.’ Gallagher frames narrative time – as game time and the time of the gamer – in terms of impasse (Berlant’s Cruel Optimism) and affect (Warhol’s work on cultural genres), articulating at the socio-economic conditions of gaming in a post-Fordist culture.
With another generation of games consoles upon us, this chapter explores just what is at stake in... more With another generation of games consoles upon us, this chapter explores just what is at stake in the sexual metaphors of filiation and succession, evolution and inheritance that underwrite the video game ‘hardware cycle’. Crossbreeding queer theory with platform studies, it addresses the history of the PlayStation brand and the Metal Gear Solid and Forbidden Siren series, arguing that ideas about sex (and, more specifically, heterosexuality) play a key role in shaping the production and reception of games and gaming hardware.
Sex and play have long been linguistically and culturally intertwined. Our focus in this chapter ... more Sex and play have long been linguistically and culturally intertwined. Our focus in this chapter is on how sexualities are experienced and expressed through digital games. Rather than attempting a chronological overview of the intersections between sex and games, we will address three key areas of research relating to sex and games: sex-as-mechanic; cybersex and erotic role play, and sex and the single player.
Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a ... more Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a fellow player of an online game. An interactive autobiography about a young woman sharing her life online, Cibele explores the terms on which new media enable users to narrate their experiences, represent themselves and forge identities. This article locates the game in relation to recent developments in life writing and independent game design, asking what digital technologies offer autobiographers as medium and as subject matter. It also frames Cibele as an attempt to challenge two dominant discourses about online culture: offering a counterpoint to narratives stressing the dangers facing young women who seek intimacy on the internet, Cibele also questions framings of networked intimacy as a necessarily deficient substitute for “the real thing.” Its oblique approach, however, in tandem with its commitment to witnessing the ambivalences and incoherencies of digital culture, have, I argue, led to these points being missed or misinterpreted by players, reflecting a longstanding tendency to dismiss and devalue women’s life writing.
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization i... more Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new technologies.
For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonom... more For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018)) sees as a shift away from the Freudian notion of ‘memory as a palimpsest’ towards one of memory as ‘a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark’, whereby digital subjects become black-boxed nodes in a cybernetic circuit. This shift has serious implications for the humanities and is particularly resonant for scholars of life-writing. As McNeill ((2012) There is no “I” in network: Social networks sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1): 65–82.) argues, digital technologies ‘complicate[] definitions of the self and its boundaries, both dismantling and sustaining the humanist subject in practices of personal narrative’ (p. 65). The resulting friction is highlighted in ‘ASMR autobiographies’: texts narrating the author’s experiences of ASMR and their discovery of online ASMR communities. Echoing familiar auto/biographical forms, from medical case histories and coming out narratives to tales of religious conversion, these texts show that the models of subjectivity we have inherited from Enlightenment philosophy, religion, psychology and Romantic literature retain some cultural purchase. But they also suggest digital media are fostering new understandings of personhood informed by cybernetics, evolutionary psychology, behaviourism and neuroscience. Focusing on works by Andrew MacMuiris, Andrea Seigel and Jon Kersey while also addressing a range of other texts, this article asks what ASMR autobiographies can tell us about digital subjectivity.
Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure speci... more Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more referentially dense than many walking sims. Accommodating giant spiders, Weimar sexologists, messageboard trolls and quotations from Roman poetry, Nikolai’s unorthodox spins on the ‘archival adventure’ reflect her interest in queer and trans history and her commitment to interrogating discourses of purity, progress and redemption. Reviewing critical discussions of the walking sim alongside queer, trans and decolonial perspectives on archives, identity and subjectification, the article argues that while walking sims have often been praised for telling emotionally engaging stories, in Nikolai’s hands the form assumes different function: that of reckoning with history and explor...
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization i... more Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2018
For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonom... more For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018))...
Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity, 2017
This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being tran... more This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot. Chapters 1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy awa... more Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy away from the question of sex. This article considers some of the reasons for this reticence, offering close readings of a number of games in which sex’s absence seems especially significant. Attending to these absences can, I argue, throw light on some prevalent misconceptions regarding the nature of video games and the appeal of play. Debates concerning games and sex reveal that commentators, critics, and game developers alike are, by and large, still too ready to judge games using standards developed in relation to other media forms. In doing so they tend both to ignore games’ unique characteristics and to misrepresent their potential as vehicles for creative expression—a potential suggested by the ways in which the medium has already begun to explore how technology is altering our understanding of sex.
This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being tran... more This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot.
Chapters
1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity
2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data
3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces
5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence
6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces
7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
Ready Reader One: The Stories We Tell With, About, and Around Videogames, 2024
In the age of Twitch, watching other people play videogames has become commonplace . However, rea... more In the age of Twitch, watching other people play videogames has become commonplace . However, reading about other people playing videogames remains a niche pursuit. And yet, as I would insist, firsthand accounts of digital gameplay can be entertaining, illuminating, and profoundly thought- provoking. In what follows, I analyze a generically diverse selection of texts, all of which recount specific individuals’ experiences of digital play, and propose some ways to read them.
The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drone... more The acronym ‘NPC’ originates from videogame culture, where it refers to computer-controlled drones whose behaviour is dictated by their programming. By 2018 the term had gained traction within right-wing subcultural spaces as shorthand for individuals apparently incapable of thinking for themselves. By the autumn of 2018, these spaces were awash with NPC memes accusing liberals and leftists of uncritically accepting progressive doxa and parroting left-wing catchphrases. In mid-October, with midterm elections looming in the US, Twitter banned over 1000 NPC roleplay accounts created by supporters of Donald Trump, citing concerns over disinformation. This event was much discussed both within right-wing subcultural spaces and by mainstream media outlets, serving as an occasion to reassess the political effects of digital media in general and reactionary memes in particular. Here we use a combination of computational analysis and theoretically informed close reading to trace the NPC meme...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2022
For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of... more For many commentators autobiographical videogames represent a step towards a more human vision of digital play, promising to transform a medium still widely associated with mindless and dehumanising virtual violence into a vector for self-expression, empathy and understanding. Viewed through the lens of life-writing theory, however, the situation looks somewhat different. As scholars in this field have shown, works of auto/biography and life-writing have been instrumental in propagating ideas about agency, politics and the human that remain both pervasive and pernicious. Their work suggests that if we are to talk about ‘humanising’ videogames we must first address how understandings of the human are constituted and who they have historically excluded. Here developments in life-writing theory align with recent scholarship on how videogames undercut the liberal humanist conception of the autonomous agential subject by implicating players in complex assemblages of human and non-human act...
IO Interactive’s Hitman is a series rife with satirical social commentary. Whether we are configu... more IO Interactive’s Hitman is a series rife with satirical social commentary. Whether we are configuring an exquisitely ironic fate for a corrupt politician or disguising ourselves as a clown in order to boobytrap a mobster’s barbecue, Hitman specialises in turning death into a punchline. But should murder be a laughing matter? And don’t ‘slapstick-stealth-sandboxes’ like Untitled Goose Game make Hitman’s humour look rather glib and grisly? This chapter uses Hitman to explore how attempts at humour and accusations of humourlessness have helped to redraw the boundaries of gamer culture in the wake of #GamerGate. Analysing the series’ approach to comedy in relation to the work of theorists such as Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai, it seeks to shed light on the dynamics of gamer humour/lessness.
Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure speci... more Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more referentially dense than many walking sims. Accommodating giant spiders, Weimar sexologists, messageboard trolls and quotations from Roman poetry, Nikolai’s unorthodox spins on the ‘archival adventure’ reflect her interest in queer and trans history and her commitment to interrogating discourses of purity, progress and redemption. Reviewing critical discussions of the walking sim alongside queer, trans and decolonial perspectives on archives, identity and subjectification, the article argues that while walking sims have often been praised for telling emotionally engaging stories, in Nikolai’s hands the form assumes different function: that of reckoning with history and exploring subjectivity.
The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories, 2018
In ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’, Rob Gallagher takes up the issue of narrata... more In ‘Plotting the Loop: Videogames and Narratability’, Rob Gallagher takes up the issue of narratability, after situated narrative theory, to consider how different video games become narratable for different players and kinds of play. For Gallagher gaming is a situated time-bound practice, which demands we address the terms on which different games become narratable for different players. In this essay Gallagher historically situates the ludology/narratology founding myth of game studies and insists instead on understanding contemporary gaming culture as ‘part of a networked culture of data capitalism, in which our interactions with digital devices, whether playful or professional, have become a source of profit.’ Gallagher frames narrative time – as game time and the time of the gamer – in terms of impasse (Berlant’s Cruel Optimism) and affect (Warhol’s work on cultural genres), articulating at the socio-economic conditions of gaming in a post-Fordist culture.
With another generation of games consoles upon us, this chapter explores just what is at stake in... more With another generation of games consoles upon us, this chapter explores just what is at stake in the sexual metaphors of filiation and succession, evolution and inheritance that underwrite the video game ‘hardware cycle’. Crossbreeding queer theory with platform studies, it addresses the history of the PlayStation brand and the Metal Gear Solid and Forbidden Siren series, arguing that ideas about sex (and, more specifically, heterosexuality) play a key role in shaping the production and reception of games and gaming hardware.
Sex and play have long been linguistically and culturally intertwined. Our focus in this chapter ... more Sex and play have long been linguistically and culturally intertwined. Our focus in this chapter is on how sexualities are experienced and expressed through digital games. Rather than attempting a chronological overview of the intersections between sex and games, we will address three key areas of research relating to sex and games: sex-as-mechanic; cybersex and erotic role play, and sex and the single player.
Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a ... more Nina Freeman’s 2015 videogame Cibele recounts its creator’s experience of falling in love with a fellow player of an online game. An interactive autobiography about a young woman sharing her life online, Cibele explores the terms on which new media enable users to narrate their experiences, represent themselves and forge identities. This article locates the game in relation to recent developments in life writing and independent game design, asking what digital technologies offer autobiographers as medium and as subject matter. It also frames Cibele as an attempt to challenge two dominant discourses about online culture: offering a counterpoint to narratives stressing the dangers facing young women who seek intimacy on the internet, Cibele also questions framings of networked intimacy as a necessarily deficient substitute for “the real thing.” Its oblique approach, however, in tandem with its commitment to witnessing the ambivalences and incoherencies of digital culture, have, I argue, led to these points being missed or misinterpreted by players, reflecting a longstanding tendency to dismiss and devalue women’s life writing.
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization i... more Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new technologies.
For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonom... more For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018)) sees as a shift away from the Freudian notion of ‘memory as a palimpsest’ towards one of memory as ‘a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark’, whereby digital subjects become black-boxed nodes in a cybernetic circuit. This shift has serious implications for the humanities and is particularly resonant for scholars of life-writing. As McNeill ((2012) There is no “I” in network: Social networks sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1): 65–82.) argues, digital technologies ‘complicate[] definitions of the self and its boundaries, both dismantling and sustaining the humanist subject in practices of personal narrative’ (p. 65). The resulting friction is highlighted in ‘ASMR autobiographies’: texts narrating the author’s experiences of ASMR and their discovery of online ASMR communities. Echoing familiar auto/biographical forms, from medical case histories and coming out narratives to tales of religious conversion, these texts show that the models of subjectivity we have inherited from Enlightenment philosophy, religion, psychology and Romantic literature retain some cultural purchase. But they also suggest digital media are fostering new understandings of personhood informed by cybernetics, evolutionary psychology, behaviourism and neuroscience. Focusing on works by Andrew MacMuiris, Andrea Seigel and Jon Kersey while also addressing a range of other texts, this article asks what ASMR autobiographies can tell us about digital subjectivity.
Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure speci... more Tabitha Nikolai’s Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court and Ineffable Glossolalia are impure specimens of the walking sim. While these are still first-person games that see players exploring eerily underpopulated environments and archiving textual fragments, they are at once more aesthetically reflexive and more referentially dense than many walking sims. Accommodating giant spiders, Weimar sexologists, messageboard trolls and quotations from Roman poetry, Nikolai’s unorthodox spins on the ‘archival adventure’ reflect her interest in queer and trans history and her commitment to interrogating discourses of purity, progress and redemption. Reviewing critical discussions of the walking sim alongside queer, trans and decolonial perspectives on archives, identity and subjectification, the article argues that while walking sims have often been praised for telling emotionally engaging stories, in Nikolai’s hands the form assumes different function: that of reckoning with history and explor...
Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization i... more Contemporary narrative video games still owe a debt to notions of plotting and characterization inherited from realist novels, even as they demonstrate how digital technologies are driving the development not merely of new fictional forms but also new conceptions of identity and subjectivity. This article expands upon these claims through analyses of three texts. Published in 1888 and revised in 1908, Henry James’s novella The Aspern Papers follows a protagonist obsessed with laying his hands on a long-dead Romantic poet’s archive; released in the 21st-century, Christine Love’s (2012) Analogue: A Hate Story and Fullbright’s (2017) Tacoma imagine technologically advanced posthuman futures in order to pose questions about datafication, identity, and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present. Considered together, they shed light on longer generic traditions, the relationship between literature and video games, and the ethical and epistemological issues raised by new...
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 2018
For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonom... more For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018))...
Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity, 2017
This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being tran... more This book argues that videogames offer a means of coming to terms with a world that is being transformed by digital technologies. As blends of software and fiction, games are uniquely capable of representing and exploring the effects of digitization on day-to-day life. By modeling and incorporating new technologies (from artificial intelligence routines and data mining techniques to augmented reality interfaces), and by dramatizing the implications of these technologies for understandings of identity, nationality, sexuality, health and work, games encourage us to playfully engage with these issues in ways that traditional media cannot. Chapters 1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity 2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data 3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance 4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces 5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence 6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces 7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy awa... more Despite the fact that most players of video games are now adults, the medium continues to shy away from the question of sex. This article considers some of the reasons for this reticence, offering close readings of a number of games in which sex’s absence seems especially significant. Attending to these absences can, I argue, throw light on some prevalent misconceptions regarding the nature of video games and the appeal of play. Debates concerning games and sex reveal that commentators, critics, and game developers alike are, by and large, still too ready to judge games using standards developed in relation to other media forms. In doing so they tend both to ignore games’ unique characteristics and to misrepresent their potential as vehicles for creative expression—a potential suggested by the ways in which the medium has already begun to explore how technology is altering our understanding of sex.
Keith Stuart's 2016 novel A Boy Made of Blocks tells the story of dad Alex and son Sam. Both char... more Keith Stuart's 2016 novel A Boy Made of Blocks tells the story of dad Alex and son Sam. Both characters are grappling with what it means to be(come) a man: where Sam’s autism casts doubt on his capacity to lead a 'normal' adult life, Alex’s personal and professional issues have shaken his sense of his own masculinity. The pair find relief in Minecraft (Persson and Mojang, 2011), discovering that the game offers a space where they can learn more about one another while rehearsing strategies for dealing with the problems they face. In its portrayal of a father-son relationship mediated via a videogame, Stuart's novel testifies to the increasingly important role games play in contemporary discourses of gender, ability, education and parenting. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on gaming and queer childhood, and on discussions of development and temporality from queer theory, crip theory and disability studies, this article interprets A Boy Made of Blocks as an attempt to imagine modes of masculine identity that depart from normative understandings of 'manliness' while eschewing the juvenility, solipsism and 'toxic' prejudice long seen as hallmarks of geek and gamer masculinities. Ultimately, however, the developments Stuart’s protagonists undergo are more about accommodating themselves to the cultural changes wrought by post-Fordism than they are any radical reimagining of masculinity. While this failure is disappointing, it also underlines the important role that game studies has to play, not merely in charting the course of gaming culture’s development, but in illuminating what has been happening, in recent decades, to the very concept of 'growing up'.
Dishonored (Arkane, 2012) is an accomplished example of the videogame as virtual playground. Tele... more Dishonored (Arkane, 2012) is an accomplished example of the videogame as virtual playground. Teleporting across an exquisitely realized, quasi-Victorian cityscape as they expose the crimes of a decadent empire's corrupt ruling class, players experience both the kinesthetic pleasure of fluently navigating space and the semiotic pleasure of piecing together narratives of treachery, intrigue, and injustice. As this description suggests, in many respects Dishonored remains a conventional (if unusually stylish) masculinist power fantasy. However, the game also turns out to be commendably alert to the ways in which gender, class and sexuality shape social life and spatial practice. As such, Dishonored spurs us to consider how gamic modes of 'spatial storytelling' might be adapted to serve queer ends.
EXTENDED ABSTRACT Recent years have seen sustained academic attention to the affective dynamics o... more EXTENDED ABSTRACT Recent years have seen sustained academic attention to the affective dynamics of social media platforms, and to modes of self-representation and 'life-writing' emerging online (e.g. Hillis, Don't Take It Personally casts players as a teacher with access to both his students' public social media profiles and their private messages. Love uses the conventions of the visual novel genre to show how networked devices facilitate friendship, fandom, romance and projective identification, but also hypocrisy, prurience, gossip and abuses of trust. As the game's title hints, she also interrogates the promises of agency with which singleplayer games attract players, asking us to consider the appeal of vicarious participation in an unfolding narrative. Redshirt, meanwhile, uses a sci-fi premise to suggest how social media encourage users to treat relationships in instrumental or 'gamified' terms. As a menial worker trapped on a doomed space st...
We’re all familiar with the argument that videogames cheapen death. Moralists preach that virtual... more We’re all familiar with the argument that videogames cheapen death. Moralists preach that virtual violence desensitizes us to real suffering, while game designers lament its tendency to create ‘ludonarrative dissonance,’ foiling their attempts to foster plausibility and pathos. But rather than insisting that games should take death more seriously, what if we were to accept and embrace their failure to do so? After all, if games ‘cheapen’ life and death by reducing them to a matter of abstract numerical values, then this cheapening arguably renders the form peculiarly suited to exploring what life means in the era of biopower and computerized risk assessment, artificial intelligence and data mining.
Keith Stuart's 2016 novel A Boy Made of Blocks tells the story of dad Alex and son Sam. B... more Keith Stuart's 2016 novel A Boy Made of Blocks tells the story of dad Alex and son Sam. Both characters are grappling with what it means to be(come) a man: where Sam’s autism casts doubt on his capacity to lead a 'normal' adult life, Alex’s personal and professional issues have shaken his sense of his own masculinity. The pair find relief in Minecraft (Persson and Mojang, 2011), discovering that the game offers a space where they can learn more about one another while rehearsing strategies for dealing with the problems they face. In its portrayal of a father-son relationship mediated via a videogame, Stuart's novel testifies to the increasingly important role games play in contemporary discourses of gender, ability, education and parenting. Drawing on Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on gaming and queer childhood, and on discussions of development and temporality from queer theory, crip theory and disability studies, this article interprets A Boy Made of Blocks as an attempt to imagine modes of masculine identity that depart from normative understandings of 'manliness' while eschewing the juvenility, solipsism and 'toxic' prejudice long seen as hallmarks of geek and gamer masculinities. Ultimately, however, the developments Stuart’s protagonists undergo are more about accommodating themselves to the cultural changes wrought by post-Fordism than they are any radical reimagining of masculinity. While this failure is disappointing, it also underlines the important role that game studies has to play, not merely in charting the course of gaming culture’s development, but in illuminating what has been happening, in recent decades, to the very concept of 'growing up'.
This paper considers the part played by modders in shaping Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls ... more This paper considers the part played by modders in shaping Bethesda Softworks’ The Elder Scrolls series of roleplaying games. It argues that Bethesda’s stewardship of the franchise over the course of its twenty year history has been characterised less by an unwavering creative vision than a willingness to make use of the resources to hand - not least the inventiveness of modding communities. Charting how Bethesda employees and the games’ modders have performed and discussed their respective roles, we track shifts in the tools, vocabularies, aims and approaches of both parties. We find that while the practices and priorities of modders and developers have, in many respects, converged over this period, crucial legal and conceptual distinctions continue to separate professionals from amateurs. Valve’s abortive attempt to introduce paid mods to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim threw this division into stark relief, emphasising the need for studies of modding which address the performativity ...
In the 1990s tech evangelists told us that the internet would bring the world together; that it w... more In the 1990s tech evangelists told us that the internet would bring the world together; that it would help us share knowledge and learn from each other. Spoiler Alert: that didn’t happen. The world of digital politics is filled with hucksters, ideological entrepreneurs performing invective for a few likes and subscriptions. It’s a recruiting ground for far-right extremists, cultists and conspiracy fantasists. And it’s changing how all of us think, feel and do our politics.
This eight-part podcast series reports on the findings of a three-year academic research project into the political ideologies, rhetorics and aesthetics shaping the age of digital politics. Featuring interviews with leading scholars and researchers in this field – including Whitney Phillips, Matthew Feldman, Becca Lewis and Wu Ming 1 – it asks why right-wing & reactionary groups have been so successful in using digital technologies to push their ideologies, exploring the history and theory to assess the prospects for politics in an age of digital communication.
“Keywords in Play” is an interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and ... more “Keywords in Play” is an interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games while using a conversational style to bring new and diverse scholarship to a wider audience.
In this programme, postdoctoral research fellow Rob Gallagher explores the world of Autonomous Se... more In this programme, postdoctoral research fellow Rob Gallagher explores the world of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), a term used by online communities who experience states of euphoric cranial ‘tingling’ when exposed to certain sonic ‘triggers’ – particularly ambient sounds and soft, deliberate speech.
Through readings and conversation in collaboration with two leading ASMR artists, Gallagher investigates ASMR’s broader historical and cultural context, asking what this idiosyncratic culture says about how we consume media and construct identities online.
Electronic Literature Organisation conference, 2021
It was in Summer 2020 that Seraphine - a ‘virtual influencer’ in the mould of Brüd’s Lil Miquela ... more It was in Summer 2020 that Seraphine - a ‘virtual influencer’ in the mould of Brüd’s Lil Miquela – began building an audience on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud. Each of her posts served to flesh out her persona: that of an anxiety-prone aspiring musician with an ‘adorkably’ girly personal style and a cute pet cat. In September it emerged that Seraphine was a new playable character in e-sports giant Riot’s League of Legends (Riot 2009), a free-to-play ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ funded by the sale of sale of ‘skins’ and cosmetics items that allow players to customise the appearance of their chosen characters. While the character proved highly popular, the launch was not without controversy, with some pundits finding Riot’s bids for ‘relatability’ clumsy and their portrayal of the Seraphine’s mental health issues ‘perverse’ and ‘offensive’ – especially when set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic (Jackson 2020). The controversy intensified when, in a post published two months later, Medium user Step-nie (2020) recounted her ‘brief relationship with a Riot employee’ and outlined her belief that the company had essentially plagiarised her online persona to create Seraphine, a character who ‘looks like me, and talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me’.
The Seraphine incident highlights how shifts in the development, distribution and monetisation of digital games driven by the rise of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) are fostering new approaches to characterisation and storytelling - approaches informed by (and often modelled on) the ‘self-branding’ strategies (Duffy and Hund 2015) and ‘small storytelling’ practices (Georgakopoulou 2016) of young social media users. For a sense of how these approaches diverge from previous paradigms we might look to The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog 2020). Naughty Dog’s blockbuster sequel confirms that gaming has yet to shake the case of ‘cinema envy’ that Eric Zimmerman diagnosed it with almost two decades ago (2002, 125). If the game’s photorealistic visuals and its use of state-of-the-art performance capture techniques mean it often looks like a film, its approach to plotting and characterisation is similarly steeped in Hollywood conventions, and entails subjecting protagonists Ellie and Abby to a series of life-threatening trials and life-changing tests of character set in motion by a shocking inciting incident. But while the game was one of the highest-grossing releases of last year, as a story-led singleplayer console game it is also a specimen of what many consider a dying breed. Drawing on accounts of fictional characters as ‘quasi-persons’ (Frow 2014), studies of transmedia characterisation (Thon 2019; Steinberg 2012; Azuma 2009) and work on games and social media, this paper asks what Ellie, Abby and Seraphine can tell us about the functions of fictional characters in an entertainment ecosystem being reshaped by platformisation.
Since 2012, Barclays Wealth and Investment Management customers have been accessing their account... more Since 2012, Barclays Wealth and Investment Management customers have been accessing their accounts via biometric ‘voice verification’ technology. Promising to accelerate the flow of capital while offering increased security, this innovation highlights the changing status of the voice in an era characterized, on the one hand, by rapid technological advancement and, on the other, by profound economic and political volatility. This paper addresses some of the ways in which digital technologies – from voice recognition and synthesis software to video streaming platforms and audio editing packages – are altering the relationship between speech, agency, and identity in our age of precarity, showing how such technologies increasingly encourage us to understand the voice as either an asset or a liability.
For the aspiring voice over artist pitching via ‘gig economy’ site Fiverr, the YouTube ‘ASMRtist’ or the enterprising musician combing YouTube for arresting vocal samples, voices become reservoirs of affective potential that can be levied to facilitate ‘the constitution of individualistic, competitive identities within the dominant narrative of economic progress and creative process’ underpinning contemporary capitalism (Gibson, 2006, 77); for women warned their ‘vocal fry’ will compromise their employment prospects or asylum applicants subjected to the scrutiny of biometric listening software, however, voices can work against the verbal content of speech to compromise claims to be heard. Drawing on work by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2014), Btihaj Ajana (2013) and Frances Dyson (2009, 2014) I call for closer critical attention to these shifting vocal dynamics.
This paper analyses three single-player videogames which explore machine-mediated intimacy and th... more This paper analyses three single-player videogames which explore machine-mediated intimacy and the narrative affordances of social networking platforms: Christine Love’s Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story (2011), Mitu Khandaker-Kokoris’ Redshirt (2013) and Robert Yang’s Cobra Club (2015). By incorporating ersatz social media into storyworlds indebted to science fiction serials and high school movies, these games exploit the affordances of the videogame medium to dramatize issues of identity, privacy, surveillance and consent – while also asking what players expect from single-player games in a world where social networks are turning solo play into a collective experience.
In a recent interview, media theorist and sometime-game scholar Mackenzie Wark issued a striking ... more In a recent interview, media theorist and sometime-game scholar Mackenzie Wark issued a striking request, pleading ‘if we must have ancestors, let’s not have the Name of the Father. Let’s have funny aunts and queer uncles’ (Moreno, 2014). Issued as a provocation to art theorists, Wark’s plea is at least as relevant to videogame historians, working as they do within a discursive landscape shaped by metaphors of evolution and inheritance and dominated by a host of ‘visionary’ father figures whose seminal works are held to have driven the medium forward. If platform studies has already challenged this model, opening game studies onto insights from actor network theory and object-oriented philosophy (Bogost and Montfort, 2009; Bogost, 2012), this presentation seeks to find some more theoretical ancestors to whom game historians might look – and, in the process, to tease out Wark’s hint that a more nuanced approach to media history might entail an engagement with queer theory.
'ASMR' culture offers a fascinating lens both on the immemorial problem of opening up the ‘black ... more 'ASMR' culture offers a fascinating lens both on the immemorial problem of opening up the ‘black box’ of the individual body to render somatic states and physiological phenomena shareable - and on the ways in which the networked black boxes inhabiting our desks, pockets and living rooms now factor into this problem. Taking as its point of departure Alexander Galloway’s claim that ours has become a ‘cybernetic societ[y]’ in which black boxed systems are not just pervasive but paradigmatic - and that, as a consequence, any account of contemporary culture and politics must address the terms upon which ideas, entities and identities are allowed to appear and disappear - this paper considers ASMR’s appearance as cultural object, unpacking its implications for understandings of selfhood in the digital present.
This paper offers a potted genealogy of a stereotype that retains a substantial influence over ga... more This paper offers a potted genealogy of a stereotype that retains a substantial influence over gaming culture: that of the nerdy, sexually frustrated, basement-bound male nerd wasting their time acting out violent power fantasies when they should be outside socializing with real people. Condensing assumptions about mediation, subjectivity, sexuality and gender that go back centuries, and in some cases millennia, this stereotype continues to inform - and deform - conceptions of play and players. By deconstructing these assumptions I argue that we can gain a clearer understanding of how digital games can prompt us to explore loneliness, aloneness and the separability of the two, to think about technologies in terms of the mediation or deferral of contact, and to reconsider the gendering of acts, media and feelings.
The sequential numbering of successive PlayStation consoles suggests a narrative of quasi-regal s... more The sequential numbering of successive PlayStation consoles suggests a narrative of quasi-regal succession and steady evolutionary progress. This way of framing ‘the PlayStation family’ is however both deceptive and regrettably heteronormative, imposing coherence and continuity onto a series of very different computers by way of a rhetoric of virile father figures and great evolutionary leaps forward. Attending to the contingencies and happy accidents, switchbacks and sideways moves that have shaped the PlayStation brand, I propose that its history begs to be thought less in terms of progressive evolution than ‘exaptation’. Coined by evolutionary biologists to denote the process by traits which evolved in response to one set of conditions can prove felicitously amenable to co-option for other ends, exaptation pushes us to write histories that are at once at once queerer and more complex
My paper addresses several recent videogames in which player-characters use digital technologies ... more My paper addresses several recent videogames in which player-characters use digital technologies to look into the past and recover narratives from their surroundings. While these games pit players against serial killers and spectres, zombies and thugs, such figures ultimately seem less threatening than the idea of a material world resistant to narrativization. Players must use ‘augmented reality’ interfaces to lift this threat, investing spaces and objects with anthropocentric significance.
Noteworthy as instances of spatial storytelling, these texts also broach the broader issue of how digital technologies invite us to understand ‘history.’
A Sublime Waste of Time: Gaming Against ‘Productive Play’
In the 20th century, or so the story... more A Sublime Waste of Time: Gaming Against ‘Productive Play’
In the 20th century, or so the story goes, visual art abdicated its concern with form, abandoning aesthetics for pastures conceptual, political, theoretico-historical. For Graeme Kirkpatrick (2011), however, art’s preoccupation with the recovery of harmonious forms from the flux of matter was inherited by the videogame. He argues that, despite their complex framing narratives and cinematic visuals, games remain closer to dance or musicianship than to film, privileging rhythm and pattern, virtuosity and visceral impact over storytelling or semiosis. We play not for access to meaning but for intimations of algorithmic sublimity, glimpses of profundity and plenitude lying just beyond the interface.
Kirkpatrick’s work offers a compelling framework for addressing videogaming’s role in the development of new forms of ‘sensuous knowing,’ and in the computer’s transformation from impersonal tool to means of emotional investment, affective transmission and haptic engagement. However, it also casts doubt on the videogame’s viability as a vehicle for expression – or critique. Meanwhile, videogame publishers continue to develop methods of routinising and recuperating players’ engagements with games - from behaviourist reinforcement techniques to data mining and biometric monitoring – creating, in the process, a pernicious regime of ‘productive play’ (Dibbell, 2006). Using Kirkpatrick’s work as its point of departure, my presentation asks whether effective resistance to this regime might depend not on rendering games more ‘meaningful’ but on taking the idea that they are a waste of time seriously – on embracing an idea of play as gratuitous.
Earlier this year, we were invited to talk at an exhibition exploring the ties between contempora... more Earlier this year, we were invited to talk at an exhibition exploring the ties between contemporary art and the game of golf. This unorthodox brief proved surprisingly suggestive, affording us a fresh perspective on themes and theoretical debates central to our research. For a sport that so many consider boring, golf turned out to have the peculiar knack of rendering spatial theory excitingly - and controversially - concrete. From the dazzling (but ecologically questionable) feat of landscaping that is Dubai’s Desert Miracle course to the outcry over Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire resort, golf courses invite us to reconsider the politics of public and private space. We discovered how, on the greens, questions concerning the ethics of manipulating the landscape, the imagination of ‘nature’ and the role of games in contemporary culture are played out in practice. We also discovered, in the course of discussing our ideas with sporting experts and with artists, both how difficult and how productive it can be when theorists get talking to practitioners.
In our paper we’d like to pursue some of the questions raised by our experience of bringing spatial theory to bear on a topic that was new to us both, reflecting on how best to apply theory without denying the complexity of either the practices under consideration or the theories at hand. We also want to consider what golf, as a practice strikingly out of step with the rhythms and priorities of the urban everyday, might have to say to spatial theory, treating the sport as a specific mode of imagining things otherwise. Taking up some of the concepts, controversies and approaches that emerged from our initial presentation, we hope to demonstrate how this kind of dialogue can inform and enrich academic projects.
With their perennially increasing display resolutions, polygon counts and shutter speeds, digital... more With their perennially increasing display resolutions, polygon counts and shutter speeds, digital media are delivering ever-closer approximations of desirable bodies. Beguiling consumers with the promise of hitherto-impossible extremes of visual fidelity, these technologies recast human figures as constellations of what we might, following Roland Barthes, call ‘adorable details’. However, they can also compromise viewers’ scopic pleasure by rendering visible all manner of not-so-adorable details: real bodies betray acne scars, body hair, cellulite and broken veins; virtual bodies reveal blurred textures, serrated seams and blocky pixels.
In such cases, that which is ordinarily thought of as excess, subordinate or marginal can assume centre stage, giving rise to decadent regimes of use and spectatorship, whereby parts are privileged over wholes and a fixation on noise, loss and imperfection prevails.
My paper investigates two contradictory (but, crucially, not incompatible) approaches to dealing with noise and decay currently prevalent among creators and consumers of digital media. On the one hand, I point to a quasi-obsessive drive to eradicate, mask or repair these regrettable excesses; on the other, to an impulse to fetishize, frame or synthesize them. Analysing these two modes, I hope to ascertain whether decadent spectatorship is necessarily bound up with the morbid fear of missing a thing, or whether digital detailism might function instead to help reconcile viewers to entropy, intractability and irrecuperable excess.
This panel will take as its starting point generic figures, or figures that have become bound by ... more This panel will take as its starting point generic figures, or figures that have become bound by genre. We use the term ‘figure’ in deference to its ambiguity. ‘Figure’ connotes both the material and semiotic; a thing and thing(s) maybe outside thing-relations. We mean to use the ‘figure’ in the sense it has come to mean in the recent work (or recently translated work) of Latour and Haraway: something combinatory; fabricated, knotty, enchanting, enchanted.
Each speaker will approach a figure that has been overburdened with cultural signification; we will attempt to unpack some of the ways these figures have come to mean in contemporary culture. Without intending to suggest these figures are only of the present—they all have histories—it is the case that the subjects of these papers have all come to be over-articulated in the present. These figures all seem to fulfil a figurative impulse; providing models that speak to a contemporary, particularly digital moment. The figures we will consider are: the zombie, The Thing, E-pets, and r&b star-bots. These figures are all generically defined: the zombie as a highly malleable horror trope that has proliferated throughout popular culture; The Thing as a science fiction reification of biological imperatives; e-pets as the digital descendants of figures from fables and children's stories; r&b artists defined within that genre but whose performances reconfigure cyborg and futurist theories.
It could be argued that the appeal of videogames rests in the way that they present a fantasy of ... more It could be argued that the appeal of videogames rests in the way that they present a fantasy of the obedient, able body as a vessel or vehicle for the will. In Henri Bergson’s terms, game avatars tend to be all ‘action’ (conscious, purposive, productive activity) and no ‘gesture’ (involuntary, habitual or profitless motions) – there is no button to absently drum one’s fingers or itch one’s neck. The irony, of course, is that this fantasy of intentionality’s victory over indolence, inertia and automatism is embodied by puppet protagonists whose fates are determined by sedentary players. This irony is compounded by the fact that these players are, in turn, both limited by the code’s prescriptions and subject to the games’ often all-but-hypnotic rhythms, which tend to address the player’s preconscious mind and muscle memory rather than any rational, autonomous faculty of judgement.
Seen in these terms, videogames begin to betray an anxious preoccupation with volition and submission, attention and automatism, action and gesture. This is especially the case now that systems like the Nintendo Wii, the iPhone and the Xbox Kinect have introduced game interfaces based not on buttons but a (notionally) more intuitive vocabulary of taps, swipes, pinches and ‘waggles.’ Using cameras, scanners and touchscreens to render the player’s body legible to the hardware in new ways, these systems remind us that digital play is an embodied practice that draws on various means of representing and regimenting gestures.
I want to discuss how gestural interfaces can become a means not merely of promoting health or creating ‘immersion’ but of ludically problematising and pluralising ideas of embodiment and communication. The games I want to address demonstrate how different interface technologies depend upon while also occluding particular understandings of the body, how communication always involves traffic between the analogue and the digital, and how gestures can evoke while also exceeding articulable meanings. In other words, they invite us to consider how digital interfaces can cause us to rethink what gestures are and what they can do.
Over the last decade DIY, indie and avant-garde developers have reimagined the videogame as a veh... more Over the last decade DIY, indie and avant-garde developers have reimagined the videogame as a vehicle for individual life stories and personal experiences. Where many critics have hailed this ‘ludobiographical turn’ as a sign of the medium’s growing maturity, this talk questions the assumption that personal games are inherently progressive – while also highlighting some of the more radical work happening at the intersection of game design and life writing.
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a term used by online communities who experience s... more Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a term used by online communities who experience states of euphoric cranial ‘tingling’ when exposed to particular ‘trigger’ stimuli – hushed speech, ambient noises and stylized gestures among them. As concept and claimable identity (if not as experience) ASMR is essentially coeval with ‘Web 2.0’ - the move from a text-centric to a multimodal web, the proliferation of webcams and microphones and the emergence of blogging platforms, social networks, content aggregators and streaming video. ASMR ‘sufferers’ have used these tools to develop and disseminate a shared terminology, swap trigger videos and publish testimonies describing early or particularly intense experiences of the condition.
Upon first encounter, ASMR culture can seem outlandish, even alarming – here, after all, are groups of people rhapsodizing over videos of TV static, QVC presenters coring pears and teenagers giving whispered tours of their jewelry collections. Upon closer inspection, however, this culture has intriguing implications for our understanding of both life-writing and online experience.
Grappling with the perpetual problem of rendering subjective experience shareable, ASMR testimonies also foreground ways in which new media are reshaping practices of self-expression and conceptions of identity. If they echo or invoke genres like the case history and the coming out narrative, they also refunction these forms. Drawing on new media theory, queer theory and the life-writing of Roland Barthes, this paper asks what ASMR testimonies can tell us about the kinds of subjectivities currently emerging online.
As part of the Eltham Open, a day devoted to exploring the relationship between contemporary art ... more As part of the Eltham Open, a day devoted to exploring the relationship between contemporary art and golf, we were asked by curator Alex Ross to give a presentation expanding on some of the themes and questions that the event sought to foreground. Our response was to devise a nine hole ‘golf course,’ using golf to frame eight propositions about art, space, technology and play today, and reserving the ninth hole for a discussion with the audience.
Born in the laboratory, videogames continue to display a keen interest in science - and not just ... more Born in the laboratory, videogames continue to display a keen interest in science - and not just through their evergreen love for sci-fi cliches. Titles like Will Wright’s evolution-sim Spore owe as much to the research techniques of evolutionary biologists as they do Super Mario Bros. or Doom, while Valve’s Portal series wittily twists videogame conventions to explore the relationship between experimentation and play.
Analysing these and other games, this talk considers how videogames represent, imagine and apply science, asking whether games can help us to understand scientific concepts, what scientific studies tell us about gaming and whether game designers’ experiments with data mining, procedural game generation, biometric feedback and behaviourist conditioning risk reducing players to the status of lab rats...
Many videogames borrow narrative and aesthetic tropes from science fiction. But as a medium that ... more Many videogames borrow narrative and aesthetic tropes from science fiction. But as a medium that combines representation and simulation, digital games are also capable of supplementing science fiction with ‘fictional science’, of implementing made-up physical laws that promote a reconsideration of our relationship with science and technology.
Horror videogames like Forbidden Siren, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame are often profoundly preoccup... more Horror videogames like Forbidden Siren, Silent Hill and Fatal Frame are often profoundly preoccupied with the capacity of technology to unearth and make sense of the past. While all these games stage dramatic confrontations with spectral, undead or demonic antagonists, the horror they generate turns out to have much more to do with the ghostliness of electronic media and the intractability of material objects; players spend as much time fiddling with cameras, radios and telephones, collecting keys, lockets and dolls as they do discharging firearms.
What emerges is a fear of the capacity of objects to look back – both in the sense of indexing the past, and that of seeming, uncannily, to return the player’s gaze. Reading these titles through Sartrian phenomenology and the ‘thing theory’ of Bill Brown suggests that they present ghost hunting as a metaphor for digitally-mediated life.
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Chapters
1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity
2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data
3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces
5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence
6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces
7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
Chapters
1. Digital Subjects: Videogames, Technology and Identity
2. Datafied Subjects: Profiling and Personal Data
3. Private Subjects: Secrecy, Scandal and Surveillance
4. Beastly Subjects: Bodies and Interfaces
5. Synthetic Subjects: Horror and Artificial Intelligence
6. Mobile Subjects: Framing Selves and Spaces
7. Productive Subjects: Time, Value and Gendered Feelings
This eight-part podcast series reports on the findings of a three-year academic research project into the political ideologies, rhetorics and aesthetics shaping the age of digital politics. Featuring interviews with leading scholars and researchers in this field – including Whitney Phillips, Matthew Feldman, Becca Lewis and Wu Ming 1 – it asks why right-wing & reactionary groups have been so successful in using digital technologies to push their ideologies, exploring the history and theory to assess the prospects for politics in an age of digital communication.
Through readings and conversation in collaboration with two leading ASMR artists, Gallagher investigates ASMR’s broader historical and cultural context, asking what this idiosyncratic culture says about how we consume media and construct identities online.
building an audience on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud. Each of her posts served to flesh out her
persona: that of an anxiety-prone aspiring musician with an ‘adorkably’ girly personal style and a cute pet
cat. In September it emerged that Seraphine was a new playable character in e-sports giant Riot’s
League of Legends (Riot 2009), a free-to-play ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ funded by the sale of sale
of ‘skins’ and cosmetics items that allow players to customise the appearance of their chosen characters.
While the character proved highly popular, the launch was not without controversy, with some pundits
finding Riot’s bids for ‘relatability’ clumsy and their portrayal of the Seraphine’s mental health issues
‘perverse’ and ‘offensive’ – especially when set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic (Jackson
2020). The controversy intensified when, in a post published two months later, Medium user Step-nie
(2020) recounted her ‘brief relationship with a Riot employee’ and outlined her belief that the company
had essentially plagiarised her online persona to create Seraphine, a character who ‘looks like me, and
talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me’.
The Seraphine incident highlights how shifts in the development, distribution and monetisation of digital
games driven by the rise of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) are fostering new approaches to
characterisation and storytelling - approaches informed by (and often modelled on) the ‘self-branding’
strategies (Duffy and Hund 2015) and ‘small storytelling’ practices (Georgakopoulou 2016) of young
social media users. For a sense of how these approaches diverge from previous paradigms we might look
to The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog 2020). Naughty Dog’s blockbuster sequel confirms that gaming
has yet to shake the case of ‘cinema envy’ that Eric Zimmerman diagnosed it with almost two decades
ago (2002, 125). If the game’s photorealistic visuals and its use of state-of-the-art performance capture
techniques mean it often looks like a film, its approach to plotting and characterisation is similarly steeped
in Hollywood conventions, and entails subjecting protagonists Ellie and Abby to a series of life-threatening
trials and life-changing tests of character set in motion by a shocking inciting incident. But while the game
was one of the highest-grossing releases of last year, as a story-led singleplayer console game it is also a
specimen of what many consider a dying breed. Drawing on accounts of fictional characters as
‘quasi-persons’ (Frow 2014), studies of transmedia characterisation (Thon 2019; Steinberg 2012; Azuma
2009) and work on games and social media, this paper asks what Ellie, Abby and Seraphine can tell us
about the functions of fictional characters in an entertainment ecosystem being reshaped by
platformisation.
For the aspiring voice over artist pitching via ‘gig economy’ site Fiverr, the YouTube ‘ASMRtist’ or the enterprising musician combing YouTube for arresting vocal samples, voices become reservoirs of affective potential that can be levied to facilitate ‘the constitution of individualistic, competitive identities within the dominant narrative of economic progress and creative process’ underpinning contemporary capitalism (Gibson, 2006, 77); for women warned their ‘vocal fry’ will compromise their employment prospects or asylum applicants subjected to the scrutiny of biometric listening software, however, voices can work against the verbal content of speech to compromise claims to be heard. Drawing on work by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2014), Btihaj Ajana (2013) and Frances Dyson (2009, 2014) I call for closer critical attention to these shifting vocal dynamics.
Noteworthy as instances of spatial storytelling, these texts also broach the broader issue of how digital technologies invite us to understand ‘history.’
In the 20th century, or so the story goes, visual art abdicated its concern with form, abandoning aesthetics for pastures conceptual, political, theoretico-historical. For Graeme Kirkpatrick (2011), however, art’s preoccupation with the recovery of harmonious forms from the flux of matter was inherited by the videogame. He argues that, despite their complex framing narratives and cinematic visuals, games remain closer to dance or musicianship than to film, privileging rhythm and pattern, virtuosity and visceral impact over storytelling or semiosis. We play not for access to meaning but for intimations of algorithmic sublimity, glimpses of profundity and plenitude lying just beyond the interface.
Kirkpatrick’s work offers a compelling framework for addressing videogaming’s role in the development of new forms of ‘sensuous knowing,’ and in the computer’s transformation from impersonal tool to means of emotional investment, affective transmission and haptic engagement. However, it also casts doubt on the videogame’s viability as a vehicle for expression – or critique. Meanwhile, videogame publishers continue to develop methods of routinising and recuperating players’ engagements with games - from behaviourist reinforcement techniques to data mining and biometric monitoring – creating, in the process, a pernicious regime of ‘productive play’ (Dibbell, 2006). Using Kirkpatrick’s work as its point of departure, my presentation asks whether effective resistance to this regime might depend not on rendering games more ‘meaningful’ but on taking the idea that they are a waste of time seriously – on embracing an idea of play as gratuitous.
In our paper we’d like to pursue some of the questions raised by our experience of bringing spatial theory to bear on a topic that was new to us both, reflecting on how best to apply theory without denying the complexity of either the practices under consideration or the theories at hand. We also want to consider what golf, as a practice strikingly out of step with the rhythms and priorities of the urban everyday, might have to say to spatial theory, treating the sport as a specific mode of imagining things otherwise. Taking up some of the concepts, controversies and approaches that emerged from our initial presentation, we hope to demonstrate how this kind of dialogue can inform and enrich academic projects.
In such cases, that which is ordinarily thought of as excess, subordinate or marginal can assume centre stage, giving rise to decadent regimes of use and spectatorship, whereby parts are privileged over wholes and a fixation on noise, loss and imperfection prevails.
My paper investigates two contradictory (but, crucially, not incompatible) approaches to dealing with noise and decay currently prevalent among creators and consumers of digital media. On the one hand, I point to a quasi-obsessive drive to eradicate, mask or repair these regrettable excesses; on the other, to an impulse to fetishize, frame or synthesize them. Analysing these two modes, I hope to ascertain whether decadent spectatorship is necessarily bound up with the morbid fear of missing a thing, or whether digital detailism might function instead to help reconcile viewers to entropy, intractability and irrecuperable excess.
Each speaker will approach a figure that has been overburdened with cultural signification; we will attempt to unpack some of the ways these figures have come to mean in contemporary culture. Without intending to suggest these figures are only of the present—they all have histories—it is the case that the subjects of these papers have all come to be over-articulated in the present. These figures all seem to fulfil a figurative impulse; providing models that speak to a contemporary, particularly digital moment. The figures we will consider are: the zombie, The Thing, E-pets, and r&b star-bots. These figures are all generically defined: the zombie as a highly malleable horror trope that has proliferated throughout popular culture; The Thing as a science fiction reification of biological imperatives; e-pets as the digital descendants of figures from fables and children's stories; r&b artists defined within that genre but whose performances reconfigure cyborg and futurist theories.
Seen in these terms, videogames begin to betray an anxious preoccupation with volition and submission, attention and automatism, action and gesture. This is especially the case now that systems like the Nintendo Wii, the iPhone and the Xbox Kinect have introduced game interfaces based not on buttons but a (notionally) more intuitive vocabulary of taps, swipes, pinches and ‘waggles.’ Using cameras, scanners and touchscreens to render the player’s body legible to the hardware in new ways, these systems remind us that digital play is an embodied practice that draws on various means of representing and regimenting gestures.
I want to discuss how gestural interfaces can become a means not merely of promoting health or creating ‘immersion’ but of ludically problematising and pluralising ideas of embodiment and communication. The games I want to address demonstrate how different interface technologies depend upon while also occluding particular understandings of the body, how communication always involves traffic between the analogue and the digital, and how gestures can evoke while also exceeding articulable meanings. In other words, they invite us to consider how digital interfaces can cause us to rethink what gestures are and what they can do.
Upon first encounter, ASMR culture can seem outlandish, even alarming – here, after all, are groups of people rhapsodizing over videos of TV static, QVC presenters coring pears and teenagers giving whispered tours of their jewelry collections. Upon closer inspection, however, this culture has intriguing implications for our understanding of both life-writing and online experience.
Grappling with the perpetual problem of rendering subjective experience shareable, ASMR testimonies also foreground ways in which new media are reshaping practices of self-expression and conceptions of identity. If they echo or invoke genres like the case history and the coming out narrative, they also refunction these forms. Drawing on new media theory, queer theory and the life-writing of Roland Barthes, this paper asks what ASMR testimonies can tell us about the kinds of subjectivities currently emerging online.
Analysing these and other games, this talk considers how videogames represent, imagine and apply science, asking whether games can help us to understand scientific concepts, what scientific studies tell us about gaming and whether game designers’ experiments with data mining, procedural game generation, biometric feedback and behaviourist conditioning risk reducing players to the status of lab rats...
What emerges is a fear of the capacity of objects to look back – both in the sense of indexing the past, and that of seeming, uncannily, to return the player’s gaze. Reading these titles through Sartrian phenomenology and the ‘thing theory’ of Bill Brown suggests that they present ghost hunting as a metaphor for digitally-mediated life.