Farocki's Leben BRD presents a world where people are constantly simulating the future so as to never encounter it for the first time.
Combining intersectional and assemblage theory shows how play exceeds the subject positions game culture inherits, including the figure of the gamer.
Deleuze's film theory helps us understand why passive subjection to an artificial intelligence can have radical consequences for thought.
Teaching students to conduct "collaborative close play" with video games depends on building the infrastructure for game pedagogy.
Play has become a central means of governing conduct under neoliberalism, but forms of 'untimely play' can challenge the historical 'what is' by asking 'what if?'
Games performed computation before there were computer games. Morgenstern, von Neumann, and Bateson show how game models shape knowledge in the human sciences.
AI-driven video games we watch instead of play... don't we already have a name for non-interactive moving images? Instead of figuring it as a break from video game tradition, this essay argues that the self-playing game is best understood in continuity with cinema -- as Simema.
Whereas most games encourage prediction, reinforce norms, and furnish a sense of mastery, recursive games like the croquet match in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the "fumblecore" video game Sumotori Dreams can frustrate calculation, unsettle habits, and humble players.
The intellectual and emotional support provided by institutions like SLSA helps foster interdisciplinary inquiry by assuaging the anxiety that rises when we overflow the bounds of our research field -- what I call the anxiety of effluence.
In this review of Patrick Jagoda's Experimental Games, I argue that past experiments with games can help us go beyond neoliberal solutionism by inventing "better problems."
A media philosophy of the computer game must grapple with its debt to the military-industrial complex.
Proposes three categories for categorizing novels informed by video games: the Ludic Novel, the Gamer Novel, and the Video Game Novelization.
Beyond games that derive formal paradigms from "normative ideologies" (Chang 19), Carroll's croquet suggests that non-binary, eventful play emerges from coupling "game" with the contingencies of life itself.
In her Parable series, Octavia E. Butler explores the consequences of felt interconnectivity through hyperempathy syndrome. Complicating affect theory and new materialism, she suggests that embodied entanglement is no panacea for human and non-human relations; it's a restaging of the politics of identification and institutional power on another dimension.
Reworking Mark Fisher's articulation of hauntology to think the interpersonal, the authors explore how BoJack and Diane stage a common but difficult to parse experience: how it is sometimes the indeterminacy, not the certainty, of a relationship's future that sustains it.
QWOP intervenes in the normalized grammar of video game walking. By making movement awkward, distributed, and failure-prone, it exposes how walking controls encode a normative bodymind and turns embodied literacy into a critical problem.
This chapter reads Ready Player One (2011) as didactic fiction for neoliberal subject formation, where developing gaming literacy drifts into obsessive self-optimization.