[DiGRA UK] Politicizing Agency in Digital Play after Humanism - Convergence Special issue

[Paolo Ruffino]

*apologies for xposting*
Dear list members,
We are glad to announce the publication of the special issue “Politicizing
Agency in Digital Play after Humanism” for the journal Convergence, curated
by Aleena Chia (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Paolo Ruffino
(University of Liverpool).

Most articles are available in Open Access. Please get in touch with the
editors if you have difficulties accessing the manuscripts.

Although digital games offer pleasures of causal clarity – and moral order
– much remains unresolved in their texts, paratexts, and practices. The
worldly coherence and agential harmony of digital games are not innocent.
They cultivate modes of subjectivity in game culture that vindicate
masculinist, colonial, and extractivist ways of being in the world. At the
same time, games are used by developers, players, and streamers to wrestle
with the limits and complicities of human agency, where stories find no
closure and things do not add up. This special issue begins at these rough
edges and loose ends to examine the ruptures and residues of agency as a
liberal humanist ideology that is crystallized and critiqued by digital
play and game making. Drawing from critical posthumanism’s problematization
of agency, the articles collected here explore digital play’s mediation of
heroism and authoritarianism, contagion and ableism, automatism and
creativity. These critical explorations signal a shift in
conceptualizations of agency away from agency as a quality afforded in the
closed circuit of game and player by building on understandings of play as
assemblages co-constituted by players, platforms, and institutions. Instead
of agentic qualities, these articles collectively emphasize the plurality
of ‘agentic modalities’ that are unevenly interwoven from player
interpretations, platform infrastructures, game designs, and developer
software tools. This issue’s focus on agency’s modalities instead of
substance contributes to the ongoing shift in games research away from the
analysis of structural properties of game systems. Instead, this special
issue presents contextualized case studies that foreground performances of
livability through modalities at and beyond the margins of the agentic
frame. Our contribution to these debates lies in this special issue’s
collective critique of this agentic frame and its liberal humanism by
grounding posthuman theorizations vis-à-vis positionalities of race, class,
gender, sexuality, and ability.

List of contents
1. Aleena Chia and Paolo Ruffino
Special Issue Introduction: Politicizing Agency in Digital Play After
Humanism
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221100135

2. Stephanie Jennings
Only you can save the world (of videogames): Authoritarian agencies in the
heroism of videogame design, play, and culture
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221079157

3. Paolo Ruffino
There is no cure: Paratexts as remediations of agency in Red Dead
Redemption 2
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221081062

4. Rob Gallagher
Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical
videogames
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221083485

5. Brendan Keogh
Situating the videogame maker’s agency through craft
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565211056123

6 Aleena Chia
The artist and the automaton in digital game production
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221076434

7. Bo Ruberg
After agency: The queer posthumanism of video games that cannot be played
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221094257

8. Mark R. Johnson and Nathan J. Jackson
Twitch, Fish, Pokémon and Plumbers: Game live streaming by nonhuman actors
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13548565221074804

Best regards,
The editors
Aleena Chia a.chia at gold.ac.uk
Paolo Ruffino p.ruffino at liverpool.ac.uk


-- 
Dr. Paolo Ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com
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