DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Microethnography/microethology bring to cybertextual analysis an attention to the operations of virtual circuits and components with, and as, their relationships to human players, hardware, and actual environments. A key challenge for a microethology of gameplay is to describe and analyze these material events as generated and constituted by various bodies and agents—part(icipant)s both human and nonhuman, hard and soft— without reinscribing humanist a priori distinctions between subject and object. Assumptions or assertions of subject / object distinctions in gameplay, at best allow attention to only some of the gameplay event’s components: the screen images but not the human player’s behaviours; physical movements but not rule sets, and so on. But at worse, such distinctions deny the co‐constitutional nature of gameplay as intense, intimate, and cybernetic—as relations and transformations of speed, slowness, and affect between all part(icipant)s: they break the circuit.

What might the starting point, the focus, be of a microethology of gameplay? In place of ‘‘identification’’ as the privileged term for the relationship of human and nonhuman in videogame play, I suggest collusion. The word has a ludic etymology (co‐lusion), so to collude is not only ‘‘to work with another’’ or ‘‘act in concert with’’, but also ‘‘to act in play’’, to come together in, and as, play. The word does not in itself assume anything about the nature of the colluding entities, but indicates the videogame’s material distribution of agencies and the positioning of agents, bodies, or part(icipant)s. The event is constituted by the coming together in play, the collusion of material and imaginary elements: the operations of games (their conventions, rules, and prescriptions), embodied knowledge and technicities (and pleasures, anxieties, frustrations, imagination), play practices (role play, toy play), screen media images and characters, virtual game worlds (and their physics, automata, and affordances), and all sorts of bodies.

Questioning the conceptual centrality of the human subject does not mean that human desires, anxieties, identifications, and investments are not in play in media technoculture. In the events briefly described above, the different games are spun into being, through the tastes, personalities, and abilities—the technicities—of the human part(icipant)s as well as the material affordances of computer hardware and software simulacra, and beyond—into whatever resources are at hand for play, including actual toadstools and fields. If code and information must be understood as real, material, of the world, then so too can the intangible yet real, embodied yet distributed, monstrous, operations of human parts— perception, imagination, creativity, anxiety, play—without always already reducing these to the reassuring synechdoches of ‘‘identity’’ and ‘‘subjectivity.’’