Edge Cases: A Mangle of Interface in Games.

• In Event: Games, Virtual Technologies, and STS - I

Abstract

STS helps us think about context and connections; infrastructures and ecologies. Game scholars often describe the relationship between players and video games without clearly addressing the various non-play-centered interfaces and infrastructures mediating this connection, exerting influence on player and game alike, and surrounding and supporting the activity of gaming. These peripheral-to-play interfaces broker transactions that resolve player access or authorization, the visual in-game representation of who a player controls, and how they control them. This talk revolves around two examples of peripheral interfaces: “casting mechanics,” or character selection, customization, and creation; and login/authentication. Through these examples, I will describe how attending to this mechanical mangle (Pickering, 1995) that governs how we access or interact with games can help scholars better interrogate issues that surround and enclose games. In Play Between Worlds, T.L. Taylor describes how boundaries “can be the place in which […] previously hidden practices are accounted for” (Taylor, 2009). I point to the mechanical and functional periphery of play “not seen as central in the retellings of these games” (Taylor, 2009). The interfaces I examine in this talk are the often “hidden mechanisms subtending those processes more familiar” (Star, 1999); they may be secondary, obscured, or out of focus compared to common game-related objects of study, but they are no less essential. As Star describes infrastructure, these periludic elements are “both relational and ecological” (Star, 1999), and attending to them provides important nuance, situatedness, and understanding to questions we ask about our experiences with games.

Author

• Daniel L Gardner, Informatics, UC Irvine