Special Issues edited
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Although digital games offer pleasures of causal clarity – and moral order – much remains unresolved in their texts, paratexts, and practices. The worldly coherence and agential harmony of digital games are not innocent. They cultivate modes of subjectivity in game culture that vindicate masculinist, colonial, and extractivist ways of being in the world. At the same time, games are used by developers, players, and streamers to wrestle with the limits and complicities of human agency, where stories find no closure and things do not add up. This special issue begins at these rough edges and loose ends to examine the ruptures and residues of agency as a liberal humanist ideology that is crystallized and critiqued by digital play and game making. Drawing from critical posthumanism’s problematization of agency, the articles collected here explore digital play’s mediation of heroism and authoritarianism, contagion and ableism, automatism and creativity. These critical explorations signal a shift in conceptualizations of agency away from agency as a quality afforded in the closed circuit of game and player by building on understandings of play as assemblages co-constituted by players, platforms, and institutions. Instead of agentic qualities, these articles collectively emphasize the plurality of ‘agentic modalities’ that are unevenly interwoven from player interpretations, platform infrastructures, game designs, and developer software tools. This issue’s focus on agency’s modalities instead of substance contributes to the ongoing shift in games research away from the analysis of structural properties of game systems. Instead, this special issue presents contextualized case studies that foreground performances of livability through modalities at and beyond the margins of the agentic frame. Our contribution to these debates lies in this special issue’s collective critique of this agentic frame and its liberal humanism by grounding posthuman theorizations vis-à-vis positionalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. |
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Special Issues in progress
TIME MACHINES, QUANTUM TEMPORAL DEFORMATIONS
AND ESCAPING LINEAR CHRONOLOGY ACROSS MEDIA ARTS
Special Issue Editors: Michael Goddard, James Burton, Aleena Chia
Read our Introduction
AND ESCAPING LINEAR CHRONOLOGY ACROSS MEDIA ARTS
Special Issue Editors: Michael Goddard, James Burton, Aleena Chia
Read our Introduction
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Media Theory | Special Issue Editors: Benjamin Nicoll, Aleena Chia, Braxton Soderman
This special issue will commission articles on videogame theory from scholars in the humanities and social sciences, especially those working in the field of videogame studies. Videogame scholars have drawn on a range of theories to analyse and interpret the medium, including affect theory (Anable 2018), queer theory (Ruberg 2019), visual theory and critical race theory (Murray 2018), and postcolonial theory (Mukherjee 2017). Yet, while a range of theories have been used to gain insight into videogames, videogames are themselves rarely used to gain insight into theory. Unlike film and literature, for example, videogames are not typically mobilized to give voice to theoretical insights that theorists have not yet articulated for themselves. While exceptions exist, like McKenzie Wark’s (2007) Gamer Theory, such experiments are rare. The articles commissioned for this special issue will not simply apply theory to the study of videogames or recapitulate key theories in videogame studies, but explore how and to what extent videogames prompt us to theorize anew. Rather than revising the formalist debates associated with the field’s formative years, articles will utilize videogames to make contributions to broader theoretical conversations in media and cultural studies and/or critical and continental thought. CFP IS CLOSED. |
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IN PROGRESS. Invited contributions under review.
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