Affective and Entangled Worldings in Games

• In Event: 4S at Play: Video Game Studies in STS - I

Abstract

Drawing on STS, game studies, and queer theory, this paper examines the possibilities of theorizing worldings and video games together. Worlding has become a useful analytic in STS to think through the how worlds and knowledge are "socially and materially generated in everyday practice within specific power relations." (Otsuki et al. 2018). While game scholars often talk about game worlds because of levels and fantasy settings, STS can contribute to this discussion of worldings in games by incorporating questions of how these larger sociotechnical worlds get made through the entanglements of players, game technologies, affects, discourses, space-times, materiality, infrastructures, and institutions. This conceptual piece, drawn from my own ethnographic research on queer gaming communities, articulates how we might attend to the ontological politics of game worlds and how these worlds generate affectively charged modes of relationality across players, games, and communities.

Otsuki, Grant Jun, Shiho Satsuka, Keiichi Omura, and Atsuro Morita. 2018. “Introduction.” In The World Multiple: Quotidian Politics of Knowing and Generating Entangled Worlds, edited by Keiichi Omura, Grant Jun Ostuki, Shiho Satsuka, and Atsuro Morita, 1-17. Routledge.

Author

• Spencer Taylor Berdiago Ruelos, University of California, Irvine