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Doug Stark

The university of Texas at Arlington, English, Faculty Member

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Doug Stark is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. Doug’s research lies at the intersection of film and media studies, game and play studies, and science and technology studies, with a particular focus on how the practice of play has brokered our adaptation to physical, social, and technological change from the Industrial Revolution to the Information Age. His current project – Untimely Play: History, Habit, Games – charts an alternate history of game criticism to grapple with the vexed relationship between play and power under neoliberalism. Find his work in journals Extrapolation, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, Post-45, Eludamos, Qui Parle, Leonardo, and Configurations, as well as collections Playing the Field, Encyclopedia of Video Games, Depictions of Power, The Post-Gamer Turn, and Interplay
Supervisors: Dissertation Committee: Gregory Flaxman, Inga Pollmann, Rick Warner, Gabriel Trop, Luciana Parisi, and Patrick Jagoda

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Journal Articles by Doug Stark

The Anxiety of Effluence

Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective, 2023

This is my contribution to a series of short reflections on the history of game studies at the So... more This is my contribution to a series of short reflections on the history of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), "Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective." I argue that the intellectual and emotional support provided by institutions like SLSA helps foster interdisciplinary inquiry by assuaging the anxiety that rises when we overflow the bounds of our research field -- that is, the anxiety of effluence.

Games as Epistemic Mediators: Rethinking Gamification with Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Bateson

Configurations, 2024

This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a t... more This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a twenty-first-century design technique. People have applied games to non-entertainment domains for millennia, especially to perform functions that we now associate with computational media, but their status as “epistemic mediators” comes to the fore in recent history. Stark examines two twentieth-century uses of games as models for systems that, contrasted, evidence distinct approaches to formalizing phenomena in the human sciences. First, Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) illustrates the propensity game models have to reduce complexity, mechanize judgment, and promote capitalist values. Then, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic game models serve as counterexamples that, along with his critiques of game theory, the conclusion brings to bear on current debates about gamification.

Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought through Play

Leonardo, 2023

Though critics consider games fundamentally indeterminate, common sense dictates that game-based ... more Though critics consider games fundamentally indeterminate, common sense dictates that game-based contingency is paradigmatically delimited—possible moves and outcomes preset and immutable. Drawing on cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, this article elaborates a second paradigm for game-based contingency wherein the game neither determines possibilities beforehand nor excludes aberrance but integrates contingency by recursively modifying its structure. It explicates this second paradigm’s ethical import vis-à-vis the croquet match in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “fumblecore” video game Sumotori Dreams. Whereas most games encourage prediction, reinforce norms, and furnish a sense of mastery, these recursive games can frustrate calculation, unsettle habits, and humble players.

Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy

Eludamos, 2021

It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game -- invested as media philosophy i... more It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game -- invested as media philosophy is in how media engender modalities of thought — to grapple with the computer game’s heritage. Specifically, the essay addresses an issue raised by attention to the computer game’s historical intertwinement with the military and industry: the extent to which these cybernetic machines, overdetermined by their techno-epistemic conditions, continue to perpetuate the ways of thinking from which they derived.

The first section of the essay reconstructs parts of this history, drawing primarily on Claus Pias’s computer game genealogy: Computer Game Worlds (2017). It pays particular attention to how the prehistory of time-critical action games reveals their close relationship with and tacit optimization of player pre-reflective perceptual and sensorimotor capacities.

The second section considers the lasting implications of the computer game’s historical a priori vis-à-vis their propensity to train their users. It engages with Patrick Crogan’s argument in Gameplay Mode (2011) that computer games are the “reproduction rather than simply the ‘product’ of […] Cold War mentality” and foregrounds his claims as important considerations for any attempt to think media philosophically with and through the medium (2011, p.105).

That said, the essay concludes recouping the computer game by way of the very training function it appears condemnable for. Drawing on Mark Hansen (2000), my contention is that Pias and Crogan place in relief what I figure as a creative consequence of computer game play with implications for media philosophy: brokering our corporeal, pre-reflective adaptation to and, thus, agency within our contemporary lifeworld. It is by virtue of, not in spite of, computer games cybernetically working on us that they potentiate ways of thinking about and living in digital culture.

The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane

Post45, 2020

This short, co-written essay draws on our (the authors') shared practice of watching BoJack Horse... more This short, co-written essay draws on our (the authors') shared practice of watching BoJack Horseman to discuss BoJack and Diane’s friendship arc across the series -- two characters through whom we mediate and come to understand our own friendship. Reworking Mark Fisher's articulation of hauntology to think the interpersonal, we explore how BoJack and Diane stage a common but difficult to parse experience: how it is sometimes the indeterminacy, not the certainty, of a relationship’s future that sustains it.

"A More Realistic View:" Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

Extrapolation, 2020

In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la let... more In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions—provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.

Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2020

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to cast a critical eye on an arguably conservative... more The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to cast a critical eye on an arguably conservative aspect of so-called ‘walking simulators’ -- their walking simulation -- and, second, to position viral browser game QWOP (2008) as an intervention into dominant paradigms of video game walking control. The first half discusses how walking simulators inherit and share a ‘grammar of action’ for simulating walking with a number of other games (Galloway). I argue this grammar of action constitutes the reification of a particular subject position ‐- one associated with a normative bodymind -‐ in video gameplay via a combination of representations, control procedures, and player ‘embodied literacy’ (Keogh). The second half considers QWOP’s alternate grammar of walking simulation and how this precipitates a different relationship between player and video game, prompting questions about distributed cognition, intentionality, failure and what it means for a game to be critical.

Chapters, Entries, and Reviews by Doug Stark

Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

This review essay presents the central moves of Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games, underscoring... more This review essay presents the central moves of Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games, underscoring the monograph’s interventions into discourse on games, neoliberalism, affect theory, and posttruth politics. Jagoda demonstrates that the critical stakes of thinking with games derive from their affinities with the now common sense ideology they shaped. Game theory’s definition of rational behavior, for example, provided the blueprint for neoliberal political philosophy. Moreover, games continue to share concepts central to late capitalism including choice, control, difficulty, failure, and improvisation. By way of close readings, Jagoda argues that games stage experiments with these concepts that complicate them, fostering “better problems” that surpass their neoliberal articulation in terms of solutionism, entrepreneurialism, and individualism to found new affectivities and collectivities. Throughout the essay, I emphasize the timeliness of Jagoda’s project but his claim that games “unfold in but are not entirely of the neoliberal era” (276) poses a question he doesn’t pursue: If today’s “age of gamification” harbors a sense of play commensurate with neoliberal world making, do other ages or cultures suggest alternatives? To conclude, the essay proposes a practice of strategic achronicity -- attention to what Nietzsche might call “untimely” games -- as a means of reinventing the present state of play.

Video Game Novels

Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press., 2021

This encyclopaedia entry is propaedeutic to research into novels centred around video games. It b... more This encyclopaedia entry is propaedeutic to research into novels centred around video games. It begins by surveying some theories of the novel to orient the reader vis-a-vis the specificity of the video game novel (as oppose to, say, video game literature) before proposing a heuristic consisting of three categories: the Ludic Novel, which formally integrates attributes traditionally associated with games (including but not reducible to video games); the Gamer Novel, whereby the realities of video game culture furnish a significant portion of the text's diegesis; the Video Game Novelization, which attempts a direct transposition of a video game title into novel form. In each case, the entry points to a range of contemporary examples as well as notable precursors.

Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject

Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, 2019

This chapter considers the social function of video game literature by examining Ernest Cline's R... more This chapter considers the social function of video game literature by examining Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. It interprets Cline's 2011 text as didactic novel that, on the surface, teaches its reader about 1980s culture but, in substance, promotes the ethic of neoliberalism in three ways: by presenting the illusion of gamers as progressive, countercultural figures who oppose corporate greed; by modelling a gamer conduct that coheres with neoliberal principles; and by having readers replicate the novel's fictional egg hunt through Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and other transmedia content. It argues that Pierre Boudieu's notion of "cultural capital" is insufficient for coming to terms with the operation of power in gaming communities, offering Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Byung-Chul Han's analyses of neoliberal power as a corrective. Beyond critique, the chapter concludes by proposing that Cline's novel speaks to the pleasures of accumulation and, therefore, why we find neoliberal self-entrepreneurship so compelling.

Miscellaneous by Doug Stark

Reimagining Play with Lewis Carroll’s Croquet

In Media Res, 2020

Game scholar Edmond Chang calls for a “Queer(er) play” that, beyond representation, would reimagi... more Game scholar Edmond Chang calls for a “Queer(er) play” that, beyond representation, would reimagine the grammars and logics through which we relate and act in games. What might this look like? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this short response to the notion of "non-binary games" proposes that the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland suggests an alternative.

The Anxiety of Effluence

Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective, 2023

This is my contribution to a series of short reflections on the history of game studies at the So... more This is my contribution to a series of short reflections on the history of game studies at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), "Playing at SLSA: A Game Studies Stream Retrospective." I argue that the intellectual and emotional support provided by institutions like SLSA helps foster interdisciplinary inquiry by assuaging the anxiety that rises when we overflow the bounds of our research field -- that is, the anxiety of effluence.

Games as Epistemic Mediators: Rethinking Gamification with Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Bateson

Configurations, 2024

This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a t... more This article contends that gamification is a longstanding means of making knowledge, not just a twenty-first-century design technique. People have applied games to non-entertainment domains for millennia, especially to perform functions that we now associate with computational media, but their status as “epistemic mediators” comes to the fore in recent history. Stark examines two twentieth-century uses of games as models for systems that, contrasted, evidence distinct approaches to formalizing phenomena in the human sciences. First, Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) illustrates the propensity game models have to reduce complexity, mechanize judgment, and promote capitalist values. Then, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic game models serve as counterexamples that, along with his critiques of game theory, the conclusion brings to bear on current debates about gamification.

Exercises in Humility: Gregory Bateson on Contingency, Croquet, and Revising Habits of Thought through Play

Leonardo, 2023

Though critics consider games fundamentally indeterminate, common sense dictates that game-based ... more Though critics consider games fundamentally indeterminate, common sense dictates that game-based contingency is paradigmatically delimited—possible moves and outcomes preset and immutable. Drawing on cyberneticist Gregory Bateson, this article elaborates a second paradigm for game-based contingency wherein the game neither determines possibilities beforehand nor excludes aberrance but integrates contingency by recursively modifying its structure. It explicates this second paradigm’s ethical import vis-à-vis the croquet match in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and “fumblecore” video game Sumotori Dreams. Whereas most games encourage prediction, reinforce norms, and furnish a sense of mastery, these recursive games can frustrate calculation, unsettle habits, and humble players.

Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy

Eludamos, 2021

It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game -- invested as media philosophy i... more It behoves a media philosophical appraisal of the computer game -- invested as media philosophy is in how media engender modalities of thought — to grapple with the computer game’s heritage. Specifically, the essay addresses an issue raised by attention to the computer game’s historical intertwinement with the military and industry: the extent to which these cybernetic machines, overdetermined by their techno-epistemic conditions, continue to perpetuate the ways of thinking from which they derived.

The first section of the essay reconstructs parts of this history, drawing primarily on Claus Pias’s computer game genealogy: Computer Game Worlds (2017). It pays particular attention to how the prehistory of time-critical action games reveals their close relationship with and tacit optimization of player pre-reflective perceptual and sensorimotor capacities.

The second section considers the lasting implications of the computer game’s historical a priori vis-à-vis their propensity to train their users. It engages with Patrick Crogan’s argument in Gameplay Mode (2011) that computer games are the “reproduction rather than simply the ‘product’ of […] Cold War mentality” and foregrounds his claims as important considerations for any attempt to think media philosophically with and through the medium (2011, p.105).

That said, the essay concludes recouping the computer game by way of the very training function it appears condemnable for. Drawing on Mark Hansen (2000), my contention is that Pias and Crogan place in relief what I figure as a creative consequence of computer game play with implications for media philosophy: brokering our corporeal, pre-reflective adaptation to and, thus, agency within our contemporary lifeworld. It is by virtue of, not in spite of, computer games cybernetically working on us that they potentiate ways of thinking about and living in digital culture.

The Lost Futures of BoJack and Diane

Post45, 2020

This short, co-written essay draws on our (the authors') shared practice of watching BoJack Horse... more This short, co-written essay draws on our (the authors') shared practice of watching BoJack Horseman to discuss BoJack and Diane’s friendship arc across the series -- two characters through whom we mediate and come to understand our own friendship. Reworking Mark Fisher's articulation of hauntology to think the interpersonal, we explore how BoJack and Diane stage a common but difficult to parse experience: how it is sometimes the indeterminacy, not the certainty, of a relationship’s future that sustains it.

"A More Realistic View:" Reimagining Sympoietic Practice in Octavia Butler’s Parable Series

Extrapolation, 2020

In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la let... more In this essay, I contend hyperempathy syndrome constitutes a kind of new materialism avant la lettre, prefiguring problems we are perhaps only now in a position to address academically. In other words, if both current scientific and philosophical conceptions of life attest that beings are always already co-constituted by their surroundings, we can no longer rely on a model of subjectivity and personhood that presupposes clear, bounded individuation. Before the popularization of affect theory and new materialism, Octavia E. Butler’s hyperempathy—a condition causing possessors to have an embodied response to visual perception of others’ emotions—provides a speculation on the consequences of the felt, interconnectivity of beings that “sympoiesis” characterizes. Against assumptions that interconnectivity necessarily precipitates more ethical modes of being in the world, Butler challenges static claims about shared substance and experience by providing a more complex depiction of what it means to feel as others do. I argue that Butler’s presentation of hyperempathy demonstrates that sharing experience is not a panacea for human and non-human relations but a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.

Unsettling Embodied Literacy in QWOP the Walking Simulator

Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 2020

The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to cast a critical eye on an arguably conservative... more The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to cast a critical eye on an arguably conservative aspect of so-called ‘walking simulators’ -- their walking simulation -- and, second, to position viral browser game QWOP (2008) as an intervention into dominant paradigms of video game walking control. The first half discusses how walking simulators inherit and share a ‘grammar of action’ for simulating walking with a number of other games (Galloway). I argue this grammar of action constitutes the reification of a particular subject position ‐- one associated with a normative bodymind -‐ in video gameplay via a combination of representations, control procedures, and player ‘embodied literacy’ (Keogh). The second half considers QWOP’s alternate grammar of walking simulation and how this precipitates a different relationship between player and video game, prompting questions about distributed cognition, intentionality, failure and what it means for a game to be critical.

Better Problems: Neoliberalism, Strategic Achronicity, and the Experimental Games To-Be-Made

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, 2021

This review essay presents the central moves of Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games, underscoring... more This review essay presents the central moves of Patrick Jagoda’s Experimental Games, underscoring the monograph’s interventions into discourse on games, neoliberalism, affect theory, and posttruth politics. Jagoda demonstrates that the critical stakes of thinking with games derive from their affinities with the now common sense ideology they shaped. Game theory’s definition of rational behavior, for example, provided the blueprint for neoliberal political philosophy. Moreover, games continue to share concepts central to late capitalism including choice, control, difficulty, failure, and improvisation. By way of close readings, Jagoda argues that games stage experiments with these concepts that complicate them, fostering “better problems” that surpass their neoliberal articulation in terms of solutionism, entrepreneurialism, and individualism to found new affectivities and collectivities. Throughout the essay, I emphasize the timeliness of Jagoda’s project but his claim that games “unfold in but are not entirely of the neoliberal era” (276) poses a question he doesn’t pursue: If today’s “age of gamification” harbors a sense of play commensurate with neoliberal world making, do other ages or cultures suggest alternatives? To conclude, the essay proposes a practice of strategic achronicity -- attention to what Nietzsche might call “untimely” games -- as a means of reinventing the present state of play.

Video Game Novels

Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology and Art of Gaming, 2nd ed., edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, Greenwood Press., 2021

This encyclopaedia entry is propaedeutic to research into novels centred around video games. It b... more This encyclopaedia entry is propaedeutic to research into novels centred around video games. It begins by surveying some theories of the novel to orient the reader vis-a-vis the specificity of the video game novel (as oppose to, say, video game literature) before proposing a heuristic consisting of three categories: the Ludic Novel, which formally integrates attributes traditionally associated with games (including but not reducible to video games); the Gamer Novel, whereby the realities of video game culture furnish a significant portion of the text's diegesis; the Video Game Novelization, which attempts a direct transposition of a video game title into novel form. In each case, the entry points to a range of contemporary examples as well as notable precursors.

Ludic Literature: Ready Player One as Didactic Fiction for the Neoliberal Subject

Playing the Field: Video Games and American Studies, 2019

This chapter considers the social function of video game literature by examining Ernest Cline's R... more This chapter considers the social function of video game literature by examining Ernest Cline's Ready Player One. It interprets Cline's 2011 text as didactic novel that, on the surface, teaches its reader about 1980s culture but, in substance, promotes the ethic of neoliberalism in three ways: by presenting the illusion of gamers as progressive, countercultural figures who oppose corporate greed; by modelling a gamer conduct that coheres with neoliberal principles; and by having readers replicate the novel's fictional egg hunt through Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and other transmedia content. It argues that Pierre Boudieu's notion of "cultural capital" is insufficient for coming to terms with the operation of power in gaming communities, offering Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown, and Byung-Chul Han's analyses of neoliberal power as a corrective. Beyond critique, the chapter concludes by proposing that Cline's novel speaks to the pleasures of accumulation and, therefore, why we find neoliberal self-entrepreneurship so compelling.

Reimagining Play with Lewis Carroll’s Croquet

In Media Res, 2020

Game scholar Edmond Chang calls for a “Queer(er) play” that, beyond representation, would reimagi... more Game scholar Edmond Chang calls for a “Queer(er) play” that, beyond representation, would reimagine the grammars and logics through which we relate and act in games. What might this look like? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this short response to the notion of "non-binary games" proposes that the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland suggests an alternative.