Precarious Play: To Be or Not to Be Stanley
Keywords:
Digital Games, Ideology, Subjecthood, Stanley Parable, Interpellation, DeconstructionAbstract
Modern game scholarship in the past two decades has known two dominant, yet paradoxical, tendencies in theorizing the subject of play: an interpellationary account and a deconstructivist one. Going from Miguel Sicart's concept of the ethical player as an initial compromise between the two, this article argues for an ideological subject of play that is a split subject. While a 'playing subject', as a phenomenologically present Foucaultian subject constructed by the governing structure of rules, we must recognize the parallel subjectivity of the fixed 'played subject', inherent to – and narrativized by – the game as an avatar, visual narrator or sheer content. In this constellation, the player shows to have a merely precarious position over the played, ready to lose control at the whim of the game.
References
2K Games. (2007). Bioshock, PC.
Adams, E. (2004). ‘Postmodernism and the Three Types of Immersion’, Gamasutra: The Art & Business of Making Games. 9 July, 2004. Retrieved from http://designersnotebook.com/Columns/063_Postmodernism/063_postmodernism.htm.
Althusser, Louis. (1969 [2004]) Idéologie et Appareils Idéologiques d'Etat [Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses]. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Second ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 693-702.
Becker, Barbara. (2000). Cyborgs, Agents and ‘Transhumanists’: Crossing Traditional Borders of Body and Identity in the Context of New Technology. Leonardo 33.3, 361-365.
Björk, S. and Holopainen, J. (2005), Patterns in Game Design. Boston: Charles River Media.
Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press.
Carr, D. (2007). Un-Situated Play? Textual Analysis and Digital Games. DiGRA Hard Core Column #18. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/hardcore-18-un-situated-play-textual-analysis-and-digital-games-diane-carr/.
Core Design. (1996). Tomb Raider, Eidos Interactive, PC.
Derrida, J. (1967 [1997]). Of Grammatology [De la Grammatologie]. trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Dubbelman, Teun (2013). Narratives of Being There: Computer Games, Presence and Fictional Worlds. Diss. Universiteit Utrecht. Enschede, the Netherlands: Ipskamp Drukkers, 2013. Igitur Archief.
Foucault, Michel. (2001). Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Ed. James D. Faubion. London: Penguin.
Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. (2009). Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
EDGE. (2014). Eyeing the Virtual Frontier. EDGE Magazine #265 April, 72-77.
Fiske, John. (1987). Television Culture. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.
Friedman, T. (1995). Making sense of software: Computer games and Interactive Textuality. Cybersociety; Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 73-89.
Galactic Café. (2007). The Stanley Parable, Source SDK, PC.
Galactic Café. (2013). The Stanley Parable, Steam, PC.
Gerrig, R. J. (1998). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Colorado: Westview Press.
IJsselsteijn, W. A. and Riva, G. (2003), ‘Being there: The experience of presence in mediated environments’, in G. Riva, F. Davide and W. A. IJsselsteijn, Being There: Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence in Synthetic Environments, Amsterdam: IOS Press, 3-16.
Maxis. (1989). SimCity, PC.
Mod Db. (2011). “The Stanley Parable”. Retrieved from http://www.moddb.com/mods/the-stanley-parable
Müller, E. (2009). Formatted Spaces of Participation. Digital material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology. Ed. Marianne van den Boomen. Amsterdam University Press, 49-64.
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Simon and Schuster.
Mystique. (1982). Custer’s Revenge, Atari 2600.
Naughty Dog & SCE Bend Studio. (2007). Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, PlayStation 3.
Parnet, Claire. (1996). L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. Pierre-André Boutang (prod.).
Pratt, Charles J. (2010) In Praise of Spoilsports. Game Design Advance. Retrieved from http://gamedesignadvance.com/?author=11&paged=20
Quantic Dream. (2010). Heavy Rain, Sony Computer Entertainment, PlayStation 3.
Raessens, J.F.F. (2005 [2011]) Computer Games as Participatory Media Culture. Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein. Paperback edition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 373-88.
Rockstar San Diego. (2010). Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar Games, PlayStation 3.
Schleiner, A. M. (2001). Does Lara Croft Wear Fake Polygons? Gender and Gender-role Subversion in Computer Adventure Games. Leonardo, 34.3, 221-226.
Sicart, Miguel. (2009). The Ethics of Computer Games. MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Suits, Bernard. (1978). The Grasshopper: Games, Life And Utopia. Broadview Press
Tolkien, J. R. R. (1954 [1974]). The Fellowship of the Ring. London: Harper Collins.
Turkle S. (1996). Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
United States Army. (2002). America’s Army, PC.
Yager Development. (2012). Spec Ops: the Line, 2K Games, PlayStation 3.
Zagal, J. (2010). Ludoliteracy: Defining Understanding and Supporting Games Education. ETC Press.
Zoom Inc. (2002). Mister Mosquito, Eidos Interactive, PlayStation 2.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright for papers and articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the University of Glasgow. It is a condition of publication that authors license their paper or article under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.