Ludic Cyborgism
Game Studies, Cyborgization, and the Legacy of Military Simulation in Videogames
Keywords:
cyborg, embodiment, Haraway, ludic cyborgism, military-entertainment complex, play-as-cyborgization, posthumanismAbstract
This article develops and critiques the concept of ludic cyborgism: the notion that playing videogames allows players a free, non-committal, yet strongly embodied pedagogical engagement with cyborg-being. The article argues that videogame play is a form of cyborgization—the act of becoming a metaphorical cyborg through participation in cybernetic feedback loops. Game Studies has so far neglected to deal with the historical and political implications of this cybernetic engagement, having chosen instead to focus on the supposedly educational and emancipatory aspects of the phenomenon. The history of videogames as simulations is intimately entangled with the development of training simulations in the military-entertainment complex of the late twentieth century United States (Crogan, 2011; Lenoir, 2000), and so what players are principally being taught through videogame play is how to operate military technologies like weapons targeting systems without critiquing the violent nature of those technologies. Moreover, the “cyborg-utopian” reading by game scholars of Donna Haraway’s (1985/1991) “Cyborg Manifesto,” which underlies most of the theoretical framework of ludic cyborgism, facilitates an uncritical understanding of cybernetic videogame play as an ideologically neutral phenomenon. If we wish to bring emancipatory movements into videogames, we should see the simulatory nature of videogames as an inherently conservative force with strong ties to military violence, imperialism, and economic injustice, meaning that these frameworks would require significant transformation in order to become neutral or progressive in any sense.
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.