This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the co... more This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the context of game studies' growing interest in, and implication with, the cultures of independent game development and the 'indie scene' in general. 'Indie' is the question not the answer for the authors of this issue. Together the articles herald a long term collaborative program of research that implicates concerns with the discrete and varied cultural contexts of game production, a recognition of the nuances and diversity in the tastes and values of players, and the place of digital games and game discourses in shaping and reshaping the public sphere. After this issue, we may argue about whether game studies has finally found its object but we can all agree that our engagement with the question of 'indie' has intriguing implications for the future of our work as games researchers, designers and cultural political actors. This Indie Thing What is this Indie thin...
Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006.... more Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006. Il s’agit d’un épisode célèbre où des funérailles ont été organisées à l’intérieur du jeu dans une zone joueur contre joueur (player versus player, PVP) de Winterspring après la mort réelle d’un joueur dont l’avatar s’appelait Fayejin. L’annonce préalable des funérailles dans les forums en ligne a mené à l’organisation d’un « massacre en ligne » par une guilde faisant partie d’une Allianc..
This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all ti... more This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the very conditions of its production. Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Svetlana Boym, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Chandra Mukerji, we consider the block-, grid-, and code-level cultural techniques associated with playing the game as allegories for our increasingly complex relationship to digital culture. Minecraft is not the apotheosis of cultural domination by code as much as it is a playable parable about its complications.
While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared mili... more While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules. Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines.In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant ...
This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders ... more This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the socio-material possibility of indie game making itself. In its highly publicized outward-facing role, the Megabooth ascribes legitimacy and value to specific games and developers, but its behind-the-scenes logistical and brokerage activities are of equal if not greater importance. The Megabooth mediates between a diverse set of actors and stakeholders with multiple (often conflicting) needs and goals and in doing so helps constitute the field of production, distribution, reception and consumption for indie games. ‘Indie-ness’ and independence are actively performed in and through intermediaries such as the Megabooth.
This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserio... more This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance of the idea of unseriousness for the theorization of gameplay as a sociocultural activity of last resort in a contemporary world defined by the grave seriousness of life.
This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP... more This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture.
This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical locati... more This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical location for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating the everyday social interaction and organization of subjects in the early 21st century. Digital games are considered as exemplary objects of analysis in terms of shifts in leisure culture, the increasing prevalence of computer-mediated interaction, the proliferation and intensification of visual culture, and the form and structure of posthuman information societies. The future of game studies lies in the willingness to grapple with the specificities of the medium without losing sight of and making a case for its broader cultural significance.
... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerj... more ... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present. ...
This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the co... more This introduction to this special issue of Loading… considers the articles of the issue in the context of game studies' growing interest in, and implication with, the cultures of independent game development and the 'indie scene' in general. 'Indie' is the question not the answer for the authors of this issue. Together the articles herald a long term collaborative program of research that implicates concerns with the discrete and varied cultural contexts of game production, a recognition of the nuances and diversity in the tastes and values of players, and the place of digital games and game discourses in shaping and reshaping the public sphere. After this issue, we may argue about whether game studies has finally found its object but we can all agree that our engagement with the question of 'indie' has intriguing implications for the future of our work as games researchers, designers and cultural political actors. This Indie Thing What is this Indie thin...
Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006.... more Scène 1 Le « Massacre funéraire » de World of Warcraft (WoW) sur le serveur Illidan en mars 2006. Il s’agit d’un épisode célèbre où des funérailles ont été organisées à l’intérieur du jeu dans une zone joueur contre joueur (player versus player, PVP) de Winterspring après la mort réelle d’un joueur dont l’avatar s’appelait Fayejin. L’annonce préalable des funérailles dans les forums en ligne a mené à l’organisation d’un « massacre en ligne » par une guilde faisant partie d’une Allianc..
This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all ti... more This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the very conditions of its production. Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Svetlana Boym, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Chandra Mukerji, we consider the block-, grid-, and code-level cultural techniques associated with playing the game as allegories for our increasingly complex relationship to digital culture. Minecraft is not the apotheosis of cultural domination by code as much as it is a playable parable about its complications.
While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared mili... more While we could attribute the close ties between surveillance and video games to their shared military roots, in this editorial we argue that the relationship goes much deeper to that. Even non-digital games such as chess require a mode of watchfulness: an attention to each piece in relation to the past, present, and future; a drive to predict an opponent’s movements; and, a distillation of the player-subject into a knowable finite range of possible actions defined by the rules. Games are social sorting, disciplinary, social control machines.In this introduction we tease apart some of the intersections of games and surveillance, beginning with a discussion of the NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden on using games to both monitor and influence unsuspecting populations. Next, we provide an overview of corporate data-gathering practices in games and further outline the production of manageable, computable subjectivities. Then, we show how the game Watch Dogs explores the surveillant ...
This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders ... more This article considers the history, practices and impact of the Indie Megabooth and its founders in terms of their role as a ‘cultural intermediary’ in promoting and supporting independent or ‘indie’ game development. The Megabooth is a crucial broker, gatekeeper and orchestrator of not only perceptions of and markets for indie games but also the socio-material possibility of indie game making itself. In its highly publicized outward-facing role, the Megabooth ascribes legitimacy and value to specific games and developers, but its behind-the-scenes logistical and brokerage activities are of equal if not greater importance. The Megabooth mediates between a diverse set of actors and stakeholders with multiple (often conflicting) needs and goals and in doing so helps constitute the field of production, distribution, reception and consumption for indie games. ‘Indie-ness’ and independence are actively performed in and through intermediaries such as the Megabooth.
This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserio... more This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance of the idea of unseriousness for the theorization of gameplay as a sociocultural activity of last resort in a contemporary world defined by the grave seriousness of life.
This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP... more This article discusses the origins and development of the player-innovated dragon kill point (DKP) system as an example for thinking about Foucauldian conceptions of disciplinary power and the production of gamer subjectivity in the contexts of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) power gaming. The argument considers the generalized hyperrationalism of DKP-based gaming as both an ideal digital form of panoptic control as well as a kind of ironic form of play with the limits of the possibility of control within digital culture.
This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical locati... more This article seeks to make a case for the cultural analysis of digital games as a critical location for understanding the role of digital technologies in mediating the everyday social interaction and organization of subjects in the early 21st century. Digital games are considered as exemplary objects of analysis in terms of shifts in leisure culture, the increasing prevalence of computer-mediated interaction, the proliferation and intensification of visual culture, and the form and structure of posthuman information societies. The future of game studies lies in the willingness to grapple with the specificities of the medium without losing sight of and making a case for its broader cultural significance.
... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerj... more ... Building upon Benedict Anderson's work on late-colonial Indonesia and Chandra Mukerji's work on seventeenth-century French formal gardens, we examine how the national imaginaries specific to Suharto's New Order state are embedded in the materiality of the present. ...
Uploads
Papers