Empathy at play: Embodying posthuman subjectivities in gaming

Abstract

In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avatar and player. We draw on a particular line of posthumanist theory associated closely with the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles that suggests a constantly permeable, fluid and extended subjectivity, displacing the boundaries between human and other. In doing so, we propose a posthuman concept of empathy in gameplay, and we apply this concept to data from the first author’s 18-month ethnographic field notes of gameplay in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Exploring these data through our analysis of posthuman empathy, we demonstrate the entanglement of avatar–player, machine–human relationship. We show how empathy allows us to understand this relationship as constantly negotiated and in process, producing visceral reactions in the intra-connected avatar–player subject as well as moments of co-produced in-game action that require ‘affective matching’ between subjective and embodied experiences. We argue that this account of the avatar–player relationship extends research in game culture, providing a horizontal, non-hierarchical discussion of its most necessary interaction.

(Re-)Orienting the Video Game Avatar

“…The avatar illustrates how digital games are hybrid in multiple intersecting ways. The hybridization of humans and technology exemplified by the avatar is acknowledged and explored significantly in scholarship of games, from theories of hybrid identities (Filiciak, 2003), cyborgs (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006), assemblages (Taylor, 2009), through to the posthuman (Giakalaras &Tsongidis, 2015; Wilde & Evans, 2017). Our tracing of the incorporation of avatar into everyday and academic gaming discourse suggests that this approach to hybridity intersects with a less acknowledged form of cultural hybridity.…”

“…Aarseth (2004) goes so far as to dismiss the avatar as an irrelevant body for players to “see through…and past” (p. 48). However, this position has been challenged and enriched by scholars who explore the complexity of the relationship with the avatar as a complex site of multiple (de Wildt, 2014; Kania, 2017; Vella, 2015), hybrid (Boudreau, 2012) identities, which suggest a permeability of subjectivity (Wilde & Evans, 2017) associated with posthuman identities (Giakalaras & Tsongidis, 2015).…”

I, Posthuman: A Deliberately Provocative Title

“…This entwinement is experienced in relation to technology to such an extent that “[c]lear distinctions between what is real and what is virtual, where the body ends and technology begins, what is nature and what is machine, fracture and implode” (Toffoletti, 2007, p. 2). When videogaming, for example, the avatar is not only a visual “embodiment” within the gameworld; an affective embodiment is also experienced through the avatar–gamer subjectivity, wherein the gamer is often viscerally moved in response to acts upon the avatar body (see Wilde & Evans, 2017, and Surname et al, 2018, for my work in this area). As Toffoletti (2007) states, digital technologies are becoming more integrated into our everyday existence and bodies, expediting the fundamental reconsideration of how we conceive of the “human” as an ontologically distinct category (p. 2).…”

Cultural Adoption in World of Warcraft

“…From the perspective of cultural communication, cultural adoption is a double-edged sword. In order to eliminate cross-cultural barriers, cultural appropriation should not only go through a deculturation process of eliminating, desalinating and rewriting cultural differences, but also generate new cultural contents and forms through combining the mainstream ideology of the author's own era, namely the so-called reculturalization process [4]. An important feature of American culture is its active participation in cultural adoption.…”