#indiE3

“Games under Capitalism” – an #indiE3 presentation 

[Part 1 begins at 01:35:00] [ Part 2 ends at 00:33:00 ]

Warning: not to be read by someone expecting complete ideas or full sentences. Literally, this is just stuff I worked out of my head. It’s not entirely complete because I was also texting myself thoughts during the same time period, which I may transcribe at a later date.

reconciling the self as a limited form of expression

I am an expression of my own potentiality; within a milieu of energy, my potential is in constant flux, and so the limits of my expression are always changing.

trashbin

was going to just delete this paragraph of word vomit from the top of my thesis introduction, but something is compelling me to keep it. i present this word vomit as it has existed for the last several days; it is ephemera. fwiw, it would probably be better forgotten:

the danger in assuming that politics are benign: the virtual world becomes the preferred world because it allows for the cyborg body in a way that materializes the subjective self in a way that is not damaging to the environment. the cyborg is co-optable in a humanistic project that seeks to divorce the perceived self from the material world: transcendence. security is always bodily relational; how able is the body to resist change, a perceived process of (in part) erasure. 

Edit: the following are additions to the trashbin:

resonance

if everything is energy -> expression & form,

then i guess friendship is like resonance.

where is the body

there is only expression and form.

form limits expression; form is a constellation of expression.

when we escape to the virtual world it is because we are searching for a new form. our bodies in the real world are form, and the limits to our expression are arbitrarily constrained—not by the body itself, but by all of the other forms that only exist to limit the body.

 

subjectivity is dead

i am the expression of many intersecting and interwoven systems of governance.

subjectivity is as illusive as peace and objectivity.

tease

Introduction

Virtual worlds promise to manifest a place. The nature, organization, aesthetic and design of that space will reflect a particular way of thinking unique to the designer; but, when a player enters the virtual world, they know very little about those qualities. A virtual world becomes familiar through a process of acculturation and movement. Moving, or trying to move, can teach a player a lot about what is valued, what is expected, and what is power. Perhaps any geographer or architect will affirm that the shape, material, and boundaries of a space are just a few of the elements that manipulate and encode human behavior with meaning—and the same can be said about algorithmic and programmatic structures that translate computer mouse movement into a walking avatar. Social behavior can also be shaped recursively in a space; players themselves can elaborate upon the structure in the production of culture. Anything is theoretically possible with a computer programming language, and so the design of a virtual world—unlike the design of other cultural forms related to art and entertainment—has the potential to offer players and designers unique dimensions of experience and expression that are multiplicitous and plural.

While only conceptually bounded by the creativity of human imagination, virtual worlds are necessarily limited by frameworks that organize and manifest space, language, and bodies. Theoretically, virtual worlds are new media objects; Castronova argues that they are a technology in and of themselves, characteristically vehicular environments that transport people into a collective fantasy existence (2007: 5). As new media objects, virtual worlds are representatively numerical, modular, and variable; and, they do tend to reconstitute culture in the process of “computerizing” familiar aspects of the real world (cf. Manovich, 2002). As objects, virtual worlds are naturalized as separate entities to the real one; and similarly, virtual identities are naturalized as fragmented and only loosely connected to the material body. Really—so the logic goes—these worlds are simply containers that shape and organize human experience; ultimately, they can be reduced to algorithms and mathematical abstractions that have been orchestrated for affect. Within this operational paradigm, the virtual world is rendered as a discrete object that borrows from the real world, but that does not reflect back into the cultural system from whence it came. What I hope this thesis serves to do, however, is interrogate how a rethinking of the virtual world and the body can more meaningfully understand the symbiotic relationship between the player and the virtual world as co-arbitrators of human experience. This is a political intervention as much as it is a theoretical one. Rather than try to understand what a virtual world is, or necessarily who inhabits a virtual world, I want to turn attention to the boundaries of these spaces to understand what cannot or who cannot exist within a virtual world by virtue of design.

I am centrally concerned with the co-arbitrated constitution of gender within virtual worlds. Designers refract gender politics through their games, and players routinely embrace or struggle with those values. This thesis will argue that the process of constitution is reflected in the language, space, and bodies that inhabit the boundaries of the virtual world of Minecraft (Mojang, 2011). Inspired by the work of T.L. Taylor, Lisa Nakamura, Carol Stabile, María Lugones, and Donna Haraway this thesis will trouble theoretical notions of where the boundaries of the virtual world lie, and how recursive activity in and around the game generates normative cultural praxis. Building parallel to the work of Fron et. al. (2007) and their conceptualization of hegemonic play, this thesis is a textual analysis and discourse analysis that examines the social and programmatic construction of the game by interrogating how code, design, and fan modifications limit and facilitate play in the videogame Minecraft. 

epic footnote series

Academic institutions tend to reproduce colonial schemes and milieus that only legitimate discrete packages of knowledge; my readers should be aware of how incredibly uncomfortable I am in producing knowledge about Minecraft in this way. This discomfort comes from being both within the meshwork and outside the network that connects Minecraft-related objects, places, players, and logics together. My thesis is not concerned with those people who love Minecraft and derive great personal benefit to the way the game is currently designed; rather, my observations reflect a personal, ontological desire to decolonize a virtual world that does not value plurality and multiplicity.