Playing with one’s self: notions of subjectivity and agency in digital games

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which the experience of participation or interactivity in digital games may influence or reinvent the player’s ideological subjectivity. It offers an application to video game analysis of the theoretical perspectives of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek, and thereby suggests that the simulated realities of commercial digital games cultures offer an illusion of agency or co-authorship which, in common with similar illusions promoted by parallel manifestations of industrial mass culture, may foster a critical complacency which permits the inscription of their consumers within virtually invisible ideological perspectives.

“Pay for your choices”: Deconstructing neoliberal choice through free-to-play mobile interactive fiction games

“…The tension between "illusory" and expansive notions of agency has been approached with caution. Charles (2009) comments that while there are potentials for the players to reconstruct meanings, normative principles of commercial game production encourage them to adopt the manufactured self through the illusion of interactivity, rather than to search and exercise their own. Chess (2017) uses the term "designed identity" to explain the tension between the perceived version of female players' identity designed into the games and the lived experiences of its real counterparts, describing it as the by-product and "a hybrid outcome of industry conventions, textual constructs, and audience placements" (p. 31).…”

Fostering “Digital Subjectivity”: An Investigation of Digital Health Narratives in Norway, the Netherlands and Czechia

“…Digital subjectivity has not been a much-used concept in studies of health and illness, but is known from other fields such as digital culture studies (Goriunova 2019), work on gaming culture (Charles 2009) and the domain of media studies (Giraud 2015). The concept of subjectivity has a long tradition and is central to both sociological and psychological research.…”