[Commlist] Call for Paper - Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism - Convergence (Special Issue)

Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism
Convergence (special issue)

Guest Editors:
Aleena Chia (Simon Fraser University) (aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca) 
<mailto:(aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca)>
Paolo Ruffino (University of Liverpool) (p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk)>

Since its inception, the humanistic field of digital game studies has 
been concerned with the politics and aesthetics of interactivity and its 
delimitation of player agency in relation to other screen-based media. 
Drawing from media and cultural studies, the humanistic study of games 
has adopted normative frameworks that divide audiences into active and 
passive, and media into new and old, in order to evaluate players’ power 
over and participation within architected environments. Today, 
discussions about agency in games has diversified from the analysis of 
interactive forms (Manovich 1996; Laurel 1997; Ndalianis 1999) to 
include considerations about the contexts of participation and 
co-creation in game production (Banks 2013; Joseph 2018) diversity and 
inclusion in game representations and communities (Ruberg and Shaw 2017; 
Gray and Leonard 2018; Stang 2019), and affordances of bodies, devices, 
and platforms (Keogh 2018; Brock and Fraser 2018; Nieborg and Poell 
2018) that make up assemblages of play (Taylor 2009; De Paoli and Kerr 
2010; Apperley and Jayemanne 2012). In 2018, /The Velvet Light 
Trap/ featured a special issue on power, freedom, and control in game 
studies, and /GAME: Italian Journal of Game Studies/ is planning a 
special issue on “Claiming Video Game Agency as an Interdisciplinary 
Concept.”

Agency continues to be a keyword in game studies. Agency is, however, at 
an inflection point in the cognate fields of critical theory and media 
studies. Marxist feminists have proposed ecological frameworks for 
living ethically in the Anthropocene by reconceptualizing capitalism 
through complex interdependencies and multispecies commons instead of 
the agency of individuals or institutions (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 
2009; Tsing 2015). Post-humanists have critiqued Western humanist ideals 
of reason and autonomy as masculinist, ethnocentric, and anthropocentric 
(Braidotti 2016) and proposed cognitive assemblages to understand 
linguistic and volitional acts as emergent from nonconscious biological 
and algorithmic processes and environments (Hayles 2017). According to 
this scholarship, once we shift the primary unit of analysis from the 
properties of objects and boundaries of bodies to intra-acting 
phenomena, it becomes clear that “agency is not an attribute but the 
ongoing reconfigurings of the world” (Barad 2007: 141). This shift 
requires a reworking of causality, which has been undertaken in game 
studies by decentering hegemonic play practices configured around 
goal-based challenges and mastery (Keogh 2018), and by using speculative 
design to challenge assumptions about humans as separate causal agents 
in locative media’s material entanglements with devices, interfaces, and 
infrastructures (Leorke and Wood 2019).

This special issue continues this line of inquiry by tracing connections 
between intra-acting agencies at different scales throughout the 
assemblage of play. By curating cases that connect devices and bodies to 
game forms, genres, and governance across infrastructural, material, and 
discursive scales, this special issue aims to inflect posthuman concerns 
in ongoing debates about interactivity, inclusion, participation, and 
co-creation in games. Guided by the pragmatism of the feminist 
eco-humanities, this special issue will deploy theories and consider 
methods (Hamilton and Taylor 2017) to politicize ways of 
conceptualizing, designing, and organizing games for agency beyond human 
centrism. How can critical game scholars address and advocate for more 
inclusive, democratic, and sustainable forms of play, understood as 
performative outcomes of an array of interdependencies between humans, 
environments and non-human entities? As an artistic and economic 
expression of the mediated technicity of our current age, videogames 
crystalize the conundrum of individual agency that has beset our screens 
and bedevilled our politics. Videogames also embed critiques of this 
conundrum that are often ambivalent but occasionally trenchant. How can 
critical game scholarship on post-human agency intervene in pressing 
debates about persuasive technologies’ manipulation of human volition 
and its long shadow over the mechanisms and institutions of collective 
decision-making that constitute democracy?

Prospective authors are invited to address the questions above, or 
expand the line of inquiry towards new critical trajectories.

*Submission information*:
Please submit a 500 word abstract inclusive of essential bibliography, 
and short bio (150 word) to both (aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca) 
<mailto:(aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca)> and (p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk)>
by *Friday 9th October 2020*

Notification of acceptance: end of October 2020
First draft due: February 2021
Publication: February 2022
*More detailed publication timeline to follow

A selection of authors will be invited to submit a full paper. Please 
note that acceptance of abstract does not guarantee publication, given 
that all papers will be put through the journal’s peer review process.

For any question please contact the guest editors:
Aleena Chia (Simon Fraser University) (aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca) 
<mailto:(aleena.chia /at/ sfu.ca)>
Paolo Ruffino (University of Liverpool) (p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(p.ruffino /at/ liverpool.ac.uk)>

(note commlist manager: no APCs required to my knowledge)

*References*
Apperley, T. and Jayemane, D., 2012. Game studies’ material turn. 
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, 9(1), pp.5-25.
Banks, J., 2013. Co-creating videogames. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Braidotti, R., 2016. Posthuman critical theory. In Critical posthumanism 
and planetary futures (pp. 13-32). Springer, New Delhi.
Brock, T., Fraser, E. 2018.Is Computer Gaming a Craft? Pre-hension, 
practice and puzzle-solving in gaming labour. Information, Communication 
and Society 21(9): 1219-1233.
De Paoli, S. and Kerr, A., 2010. The assemblage of cheating: How to 
study cheating as imbroglio in MMORPGs. The Fibreculture Journal, 16.
Gray, K.L. and Leonard, D.J. eds., 2018. Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges 
to Oppression and Social Injustice. University of Washington Press.
Hamilton, L. and Taylor, N., 2017. Ethnography after humanism: Power, 
politics and method in multi-species research. Springer.
Hayles, N.K., 2017. Unthought: The power of the cognitive nonconscious. 
University of Chicago Press.
Joseph, D.J., 2018. The discourse of digital dispossession: paid 
modifications and community crisis on steam. Games and Culture, 13(7), 
pp.690-707.
Keogh, B., 2018. A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. MIT Press.
Leorke, D. and Wood, C., 2019. ‘Alternative Ways of Being’: Reimagining 
Locative Media Materiality through Speculative Fiction and Design. Media 
Theory.
Manovich, L., 1996. On totalitarian interactivity. Posting on www. 
rhizome. com. Retrieved May, 25, p.2008.
Murray, J.H., 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck. Simon and Schuster.
Ndalianis, A., 1999. " Evil will walk once more": phantasmagoria-the 
stalker film as interactive movie?. New York University Press.
Nieborg, D.B. and Poell, T., 2018. The platformization of cultural 
production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity. New Media & 
Society, 20(11), pp.4275-4292.
Roelvink, G., Gibson, K. and Graham, J., 2009. A postcapitalist politics 
of dwelling: Ecological humanities and community economies in conversation.
Ruberg, B. and Shaw, A. eds., 2017. Queer game studies. U of Minnesota 
Press.
Stang, S., 2019. “This Action Will Have Consequences”: Interactivity and 
Player Agency. Game Studies, 19(1).
Taylor, T.L., 2009. The assemblage of play. Games and Culture, 4(4), 
pp.331-339.
Tsing, A.L., 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: On the 
possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.


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