[Commlist] Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism - Convergence Special issue published

We are glad to announce the publication of the special issue 
“Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism” for the journal 
Convergence, curated by Aleena Chia (Goldsmiths, University of London) 
and Paolo Ruffino (University of Liverpool).

Most articles are available in Open Access. Please get in touch with the 
editors if you have difficulties accessing the manuscripts.

Although digital games offer pleasures of causal clarity – and moral 
order – much remains unresolved in their texts, paratexts, and 
practices. The worldly coherence and agential harmony of digital games 
are not innocent. They cultivate modes of subjectivity in game culture 
that vindicate masculinist, colonial, and extractivist ways of being in 
the world. At the same time, games are used by developers, players, and 
streamers to wrestle with the limits and complicities of human agency, 
where stories find no closure and things do not add up. This special 
issue begins at these rough edges and loose ends to examine the ruptures 
and residues of agency as a liberal humanist ideology that is 
crystallized and critiqued by digital play and game making. Drawing from 
critical posthumanism’s problematization of agency, the articles 
collected here explore digital play’s mediation of heroism and 
authoritarianism, contagion and ableism, automatism and creativity. 
These critical explorations signal a shift in conceptualizations of 
agency away from agency as a quality afforded in the closed circuit of 
game and player by building on understandings of play as assemblages 
co-constituted by players, platforms, and institutions. Instead of 
agentic qualities, these articles collectively emphasize the plurality 
of ‘agentic modalities’ that are unevenly interwoven from player 
interpretations, platform infrastructures, game designs, and developer 
software tools. This issue’s focus on agency’s modalities instead of 
substance contributes to the ongoing shift in games research away from 
the analysis of structural properties of game systems. Instead, this 
special issue presents contextualized case studies that foreground 
performances of livability through modalities at and beyond the margins 
of the agentic frame. Our contribution to these debates lies in this 
special issue’s collective critique of this agentic frame and its 
liberal humanism by grounding posthuman theorizations vis-à-vis 
positionalities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.

List of contents

1. Aleena Chia and Paolo Ruffino

Special Issue Introduction: Politicizing Agency in Digital Play After 
Humanism

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221100135

2. Stephanie Jennings

Only you can save the world (of videogames): Authoritarian agencies in 
the heroism of videogame design, play, and culture

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221079157

3. Paolo Ruffino

There is no cure: Paratexts as remediations of agency in Red Dead 
Redemption 2

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221081062

4. Rob Gallagher

Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical 
videogames

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221083485

5. Brendan Keogh

Situating the videogame maker’s agency through craft

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565211056123

6 Aleena Chia

The artist and the automaton in digital game production

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221076434

7. Bo Ruberg

After agency: The queer posthumanism of video games that cannot be played

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221094257

8. Mark R. Johnson and Nathan J. Jackson

Twitch, Fish, Pokémon and Plumbers: Game live streaming by nonhuman actors

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221074804


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