Governing Play Can be Torture

• In Event: The Messy Intersection of Games and Governance, Both Within and Surrounding Games (High-Density)

Abstract

This paper is a philosophical discussion about whether torture constitutes play. Building on Miguel Sicart’s (2014) work on pleasure and play, this paper theorizes that torture is a form of pleasure and therefore play. Ultimately this presentation rethinks play as a relationship between two subjects and reconstitutes it as a relationship between subject and object. Understanding play as a subject-object relationship as opposed to a subject-subject relationship invokes important questions relating to how consent is negotiated and play is governed. And so, in the context of torture, we can begin to understand play’s ability to break down the individual, corrode attempts to govern, and produce wildly inequitable relationships. Where much game studies scholarship asks the question of how play can be set to positive and productive ends, this project attempts to pry at some of its more concerning limits.

------
Aaron Trammell is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Digital Games at UC Irvine. He was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar for Faculty Diversity in Informatics and Digital Knowledge at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, and he earned his doctorate from the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in 2015. Aaron’s research reveals historical connections between games, play, identity, and the United States military-industrial complex. He is interested in how military ideologies become integrated into game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players.

Author

• Aaron Trammell, U of California - Irvine