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Dissertation
Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form
2006
Overview
This thesis addresses the videogame as a new media form. At argues that videogames, videogame play, and videogame players, are paradigmatic forms of a popular new media technoculture and that their study should be central to the emerging field of new media studies. However the importance of videogames to, and their embodiment in, everyday lived experiences and popular culture, the intimate and playful circuits between players, videogames, and computer hardware are not adequately accounted for in established theoretical frameworks and methodologies. The thesis is concerned less with meanings constructed around computer media, and more with the materiality and agency of new media artefacts and entities in play. The adequacy of key terms in Cultural and Media Studies and Film Studies, terms such as 'text', 'representation', 'interactivity', 'identification' and 'subject' to the videogame and everyday technoculture is questioned. Alternative theoretical resources such as those offered by Science and Technology Studies, critical posthumanism and actor-network theory are suggested and explored. 'Cybertextual analysis' is proposed, and developed, as a method for studying the videogame as a software system, as a primarily simulational rather than representational form. Particular attention is given to the operations of software automata such as non-player characters and artificial intelligence. Video microethnography articulates this cybertextual analysis with the everyday context of a small-scale event of videogame play. This event is studied as the collusion (the coming together in play), of a heterogenous network of human and nonhuman part(icipant)s: the conventions, rules and prescriptions of games software; children's embodied knowledges, pleasures, anxieties, imaginations; play practices and rules; screen media images and characters; and the kinaesthetics and virtual physics of videogameworlds.
Publisher
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses
Subject
