DCRC - Digital Cultures Research Centre

Keynote Paper written by Jon Dovey & Helen Kennedy for the Games in Action conference Gothenburg Sweden 14.06.07.

The paper is based on two small scale ethnographies with game designers and players which have been generative of some critical insights in to the ways in which dominant forms of technology use emerge and are valorised as well as providing us with the means of identifying how these dominant styles are reworked and contested. These conclusions are contextualised by a review of some of the influential ways that the subject technology relation has been theorised. We use these accounts in order to elaborate a particular notion of technicity that enables us to more clearly identify the complex way in which power and difference are operative in the emerging participatory cultures of computer game production and consumption. Here because although this represents an important part of our work from early days of the Play Research Group this particular project needs more development, research and refinement before it can do the work we would like it to have done. So suggestions welcome.