Seth Giddings: "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Technocultural Form"

(In Worlds in Play)

- Games as everyday technoculture (not just futuristic/cyborg content)
- Technological agency
- Sociology of Science and Technology, Actor-Network Theory: challenge social constructivism
- Problems with encoding/decoding model: limits analysis of materiality of technology (agency, effects, affordances)
- Production, physical form, capabilities are meaningful, have effects , constraints, facilitates certain uses and resists others
- Society and material reality are mutually constitutive
- World and artifacts are both physical and symbolic
- Humans are not the only agents in the world (reject the "object hypothesis")
- ANT: "reciprocal relationship between artifacts and social groups," "networks linking human beings and non-human entities"
- Scoieties are fundamentally technological
- Symmetry of agency between humans/non-humans -> no firm conceptual distinction
- Notion that games both aestheticize and realize the cyborg idea: blurred boundary between subject and object still privileges the human
- Rather, a cybernetic circuit (indissociable)
- Practical, pragmatic to undestand computers as intentional systems (rather than as designed artifacts, too difficult to anticipate: chess programs); side-step question of actual consciousness
- Gameplay as engagement with artificial intelligence (ie: an agent)
- Advance Wars 2 (GBA) example
- Code/simulation, not text/representation
- AI as simulation (automata) -> intentional system we play with/against
- Mundane, playful, everyday, ubiquitous example of relationships between human and non-human actors (technoculture)
- "distributions and delegations of agency between technologies and players in the act of playing"