Toward An Agential Realist Account of Digital Games: Revisiting Gamic Agency and Materiality

Abstract

This paper brings together discussions of agency in game studies and posthuman research to propose a radical rethinking of agency and agential enactment in digital games. Game scholars often approach agency in the traditional humanist manner which associates agency in games with the player’s intentionality, subjectivity, and freedom. While they provide important insights on how we can interpret games and make sense of our in-game actions, the liberal human-centered ideas underpinning may not fully account for the highly technologically mediated and transversally related ‘posthuman subjects’ we have become today. Drawing from Barad’s agential realism and Braidotti’s affirmative ethics, this paper proposes to rethink digital game players as posthuman subjects, and digital gameplay as a series of intra-acting practices through which the agencies of players and games are enacted and reconfigured.