Nonhuman Games: Playing in the Post-Anthropocene

Twitch, Fish, Pokémon and Plumbers: Game live streaming by nonhuman actors

“…Ultimately we therefore echo Fizek (2018:207) assertion that ‘digital games by their very nature break down the subject-object, organic-inorganic, and player-game dichotomies’. Ruffino (2020:22) similarly draws attention to the ‘the paradoxes and contradictions, as well as the irony, weirdness, and creepiness, of video games made or played by nonhuman agents’, and we hope with this paper to have contributed to the cataloguing, and the analysis, of these same traits in nonhuman digital game play. We propose that platforms such as Twitch are making such processes and ambiguities far more visible – although not necessarily more rapid – than ever before.…”

“…In the same way, we can reasonably see a completed version of ‘Lucky Draw’ as being the game exerting its agency – after thousands, millions of failed completions, the game finally ‘decides’ who will be given the successful attempt (cf. Ruffino, 2020:21). The almost-impossibility of completion asserts the game’s agency over the human player by forcing or driving players to these extreme responses (setting up channels that show the level playing itself) and by shifting the agency to another nonhuman actor, the game itself, to play itself.…”

“…Ideas of agency and hence interactivity were instrumental in the initial formulations of game studies (Ruffino, 2020:15), and agency is thus now a well-theorised concept within the field (Jennings, 2019). Without intending to contribute to discourse surrounding definitions of agency, we broadly take Murray’s (2016:159) description of agency as ‘the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices’.…”

“…In considering the agency of technological nonhumans, as others have noted (Švelch, 2020), there is little critical or game studies scholarship on game AI or game systems, but an initial appraisal of their ‘agency’ is possible. Perhaps, the first critical consideration of nonhuman ludic agency was that of Giddings (2005) who examined the cybernetic logics of games as simulated systems; any interaction with a game system inevitably involves interacting with a nonhuman agent (Ruffino, 2020:16). Fizek (2018) in turn encourages us to think seriously about such concepts in the context of ‘movement-simulating bots, self-acting nonhuman agents, or game worlds changing without the direct input from the human player’ (Ibid:203).…”

After agency: The queer posthumanism of video games that cannot be played

“…Even as they seem to move ‘beyond the human’, video games have often been conceptualized as fundamentally human, machines for the enactment of player agency. Video games also complicate the very divide between the human and non-human, as Paolo Ruffino (2020) describes in his writing on ‘nonhuman games’: games ‘made and played by nonhuman actors’ that often ‘play by themselves’ using artificial intelligence. Such games, says Ruffino, reframe the medium, challenging ‘false myths of agency, interactivity, and instrumentalism, and the masculinism inherent in these notions’ (11).…”