This essay draws on research undertaken as part of a research network project exploring the growth of independent game producers in recent years and the associated changes in the technological and economic conditions of the games industry in the UK, Europe, and the North American continent. It reflects on the possibilities of and challenges to a critical and creative maturing of video games as a cultural medium, evaluating these in the context of contemporary developments in global technoculture and the digital economy. Bernard Stiegler’s critical analysis of hyperindustrial consumer culture is mobilized in evaluating the dreams for an indie future of video games as a creative force in digital cultural transformation.
This article introduces and situates the ensuing collection of four essays on the theme of games and technology. It argues the need for videogame studies to develop a more rigorous and focused perspective on the theorization of technology as it relates to research into games and culture. The ``and'' in games and culture cannot begin to be understood comprehensively without a thinking of the profound reliance of both terms on technology. Players and their cultural and collective involvements should be taken not as stable categories of research and development but as processes of becoming intertwined with lineages of technological development and disjunction which are the condition of these processes. Video games are not the least component and proponent of these technological lineages today. The essays collected in this section of the journal issue are described and characterized as offering such a focus on ludic technicity through their diverse but intersecting considerations of game hardware, software, game play, and other practices appropriating game technologies.
This essay characterizes the principal theoretical coordinates of Stiegler's philosophy of technology and assesses its relevance for critical explorations between culture and the political. The focus is on Stiegler's major philosophical series, Technics and Time, and how he articulates therein his contribution to the philosophical consideration of technics in relation to key infl uences such as Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Immanuel Kant. It then examines the activist dimension of Stiegler's later writing projects in the context of his work at the Pompidou Centre's Institut de Recherche et d'Innovation of which he is the founding director, and with Ars Industrialis, the association he co-founded
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