digital citizenry and death

Users employ the Internet and various digital technologies to create politics around various consumptive practices. These politics inform both the creation of an activity-based citizenry (you play Minecraft? which server? PVP? oh, you also like Candy Crush…?), and the construction of channels (YouTube, F2P, Steam, AdSense) that generate wealth for real world people. 

These technical and digital—in some sense, virtual—channels transcode the human mind and body of the user into a resource that is more easily harvested over time. 

reading the politics of admittance in games

Dear Daniel,

Thanks for your thoughts on the article that I passed along last week. In hindsight, I apologize for sending what was a dense piece of work. I had honestly not read it in a few months, so spending this weekend to re-read it was both a joy and a regret—this is how academia tends to spoil people’s social minds.

For other people who may not know what we’re talking about, I sent you an article penned by Rey Chow, a Chinese-American cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. This post makes reference to Chapter 5: The Politics of Admittance in The Rey Chow Reader, edited by Paul Bowman. The article offers a reading and critique of how Freud and Fanon articulate the relationships between community formation, race, and sexuality. It was first published in 1995.

Now, why did I send it? I suppose because I read postcolonialism as a project that (in part) grapples with the practice of equality and inclusivity. I find Chow’s article helpful in thinking about the ways in which communities are formed in and around videogames.

puzzles or poison?

[context]

When I first played Candy Crush at GDC 2013 in San Francisco, I was offended by the condescending circus cartoons that seem to mock your progress (or lack thereof) at every turn. I quit playing after one game thinking, Pokemon Puzzle League is so much better than this.

Fast-forward 3 months and I’m sitting on the subway in London. My partner is sitting next to me crushing candies, and I am bored. He eventually waves me away; Get your own game, he says.

I’ve crushed candies most everyday since; but I think my friends believe that the game has been playing me instead.