Video Games in a Global Market

Abstract

At the beginning of the book I set out the issue of the ways in which we normally see children playing games, that is, as subjects interacting with an object world. I pointed out that I wanted to engage with this in a different way, one which emphasised the complex relationalities rather than subjects, objects and interaction. I am not suggesting that I have been able to follow my own advice very well as it is incredibly difficult to even begin to look and think in a different way. However, I pointed to work which understood video game play as embodied and kinaesthetic, using the sense that we feel our way around virtual space, so privileging the role of sensation and affect. I argued for a three-fold approach to affect which looked not only at sensation but also at ideation and at the ways that these work together through a notion of the unconscious. I argued that the games embody complex fantasies of masculinity through their engagement with the ways in which the player is both inside and outside the game at the same time, allowing both for what Ryan called internal and external interaction with its ego containment or controlling ‘god-trick’. This made them both pleasurable and powerful. I have explored just how this relates to issues of both playing and regulation in relation to masculinity and femininity and to the ubiquitous debates about violence. I also used the Deleuzian concept of the assemblage to understand how affective relations and regulative practices might work together to create shifting subjectivities. I now want to cast my net more broadly.