This article intervenes in video game studies' recent turn to (and enthusiasm for) playercentered approaches to understanding video games' social, cultural, political, and economic implications. Such approaches repudiate ostensibly formalist or 'structural' game studies and insist that analyses of gaming situations emphasize ways in which gaming subjects' playful acts of appropriation or subversion allow those subjects to resist complete determination by game-structures and act ultimately as arbiters of a video game's meaning, utility, or effectivity. The author demonstrates how player-centered discourses in video game studies participate in a rich history of 'active audience' research in media and cultural studies. Arguing that research on player practices does not completely escape the forms of reductionism it sets out to avoid, the author offers additional conceptual tools for engaging the complexity of contemporary gaming situations. The article concludes with a discussion of ways in which one such situation − gold farming − might be examined as an assemblage through an approach that responds to this complexity and avoids a particularly constraining model of agency inherent in player-centric game studies.

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Against the hegemony of ocularcentrism currently pervading video game theory, the author situates the practice of video gaming for further inquiry by performance studies to account for it as a wholly embodied phenomenon. Personal narratives of players engaging in performances of the game Dance Dance Revolution indicate the necessity of accounting for both the intersubjective and interobjective elements of video game play. The performativity of video gaming insists on a consideration of its material and discursive dimensions that not only refuses to metonymically reduce the gamer's body to a pair of eyes but also complicates popular dualistic understandings of the player—game relationship.

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