Ludic encounters – understanding surveillance through game metaphors

Koskela, Hille; Mäkinen, Liisa

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2015.1126330

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 29 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Connections between surveillance studies and game studies have previously explored how game design elements are implemented into surveillance technologies and practices (Benjamin 2019;Koskela and Mäkinen 2015;Mäkinen 2017;Whitson 2015). Others have looked at playful representations of surveillance in popular culture in general (Marx 1996), game community related surveillance such as community management and paratext (Kerr, Paoli, and Keatinge 2014), surveillance of players and streamers (Taylor 2016), and how games and gaming platforms often are constructed as surveillance structures (e.g., Cybulski 2014;Wang, Haines, and Tucker 2011) or presented to the player as surveillance structures (Albrechtslund and Dubbeld 2005).…”

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

Solberg

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the increasingly ubiquitous field of surveillance has transformed how we interact with each other and the world around us, surveillance interactions with virtual others in virtual worlds have gone largely unnoticed. This article examines representations of digital games’ diegetic surveillance cameras and their relation to the player character and player. Building on a dataset of forty-one titles and in-depth analyses of two 2020 digital games that present embodied surveillance camera perspectives, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Square Enix 2020) and Watch Dogs: Legion (Ubisoft Toronto 2020), I demonstrate that the camera is crucial in how we organize, understand, and maneuver the fictional environment and its inhabitants. These digital games reveal how both surveillance power fantasies and their critique can coexist within a space of play. Moreover, digital games often present a perspective that blurs the boundaries between the physical and the technically mediated through a flattening of the player’s “camera” screen and in-game surveillance cameras. Embodied surveillance cameras in digital games make the camera metaphor explicit as an aesthetic, narrative, and mechanical preoccupation. We think and play with and through cameras, drawing attention to and problematizing the partial perspectives with which worlds are viewed. I propose the term cyborg vision to account for this simultaneously human and nonhuman vision that’s both pluralistic and situated and argue that, through cyborg vision, digital games offer an embodied experience of surveillance that’s going to be increasingly relevant in the future.

show abstract

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

Solberg

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…(James,22) These accounts illustrate how profile checking was not only embedded within risk management and optimisation imperatives but has also been re-appropriated by young people and normalised as fun and 'cool' in the context of personal relationships. The playful appropriation of profile checking as part of friendships participates to the broader normalisation of surveillance practices in a similar way than the playful 'tagging' function on Facebook and other platforms normalised and reshaped perceptions of Facial Recognition Technologies (Ellerbrok, 2011, see also Koskela & Mäkinen, 2016). Thus, the normalisation of profile checking takes place within neoliberal narratives as well as through playful everyday engagement with surveillance.…”

Section: The Normalisation Of Profile Checking: 'It Is Kind Of Cool'mentioning

confidence: 98%

‘It is an attitude’: the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social media

Gangneux

2019

Information, Communication & Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is an attitude': the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social mediaDaily life has been pervaded by surveillance, not only in the ways in which information is gathered about us but also in how we perceive and experience monitoring in our everyday lives. Contemporary surveillance and its normalisation hinge on us actively engaging with, negotiating and sometimes initiating an array of monitoring practices (Lyon, 2018). In this context, this article examines young people's understandings and deployment of social media profile checking -that is the practices of covertly looking at someone's profiles on social media platforms to gather and/or corroborate information about this person. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with young people, the article explores how social media profile checking has become taken for granted, not only encouraging surveillance practices as part of social media interactivity but also producing specific understandings of social screening. Combining insights from Foucault and Bourdieu's works, the article argues that the normalisation of profile checking needs to be understood as a specific type of practical knowledge of the social world which is embedded in broader neoliberal governmentalities and legitimises a greater social sorting of interpersonal sociality.

show abstract

“…Indeed, 'the imaginary of the smart city is often linked to fears concerning privacy, security and control' (Vanolo, 2016: 26). At the same time, the smart city control room's game-like view of the city can be seen as part and parcel of a more playful approach to urban surveillance (Koskela and Ma¨kinen, 2016), which turns the control room into a set of consoles with which the city can be viewed and manipulated, much as in a videogame. Acknowledging the videogame-like qualities of smart city control rooms does not, however, entail forgetting that the videogame is a cultural artefact that is not value-free, and that it exists in varieties from the psychedelic to the deeply dystopian.…”

Section: Analysing Flagship Smart Urban Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spaces of visibility in the smart city: Flagship urban spaces and the smart urban imaginary

Caprotti

2018

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Smart urbanism is a currently popular and widespread way of conceptualising the future city. At the same time, the smart city is critiqued by several scholars as difficult to define, and as being almost invisible to the naked eye. The article explores two urban spaces through which the smart city is rendered visible, in two UK cities that are prominent sites for smart urban experimentation and development. Bristol’s Data Dome and Glasgow’s Operations Centre are analysed in light of their iconic nature. The article develops a conceptual understanding of these flagship spaces of the actually existing smart cities through three interrelated conceptual lenses. Firstly, they are understood as a videological type of Leibniz’s concept of the windowless monad. Secondly, they are conceptualised as examples of banal and serialised architecture. Thirdly, these spaces and their attendant buildings are understood as totemic assemblages that point to newly emergent forms of elite urban power.

show abstract

Ludic encounters – understanding surveillance through game metaphors

Cited by 8 publications

References 29 publications

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

(Always) Playing the Camera: Cyborg Vision and Embodied Surveillance in Digital Games

‘It is an attitude’: the normalisation of social screening via profile checking on social media

Spaces of visibility in the smart city: Flagship urban spaces and the smart urban imaginary

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About