Video Game Research

Abstract

A central issue in my own past work has been an address to subjectivity. I have approached this over many years (see Henriques et al., 1984) by bringing together the idea of subjectivity as constituted through a process of subjectification, in which multiple positions are held together through affective unconscious dynamics. This approach has informed previous work on children and the media, notably my work on girls and popular culture (Walkerdine, 1997). What I want to do here is to recap how this work relates to earlier media analysis and to then go on to think about firstly, the debates about the interactivity of video games and secondly, to engage with how new work from the social sciences might help us to think beyond the position I have taken in the past.