Special Issue Introduction: Politicizing agency in digital play after humanism

Abstract

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.

The Duality of Cozy Games: Cozy Agency, Neoliberalism, and Affect

“…I propose the concept of cozy agency to examine how this tension plays out in non-hegemonic forms of play, by putting research on lifestyle media, cuteness, and vegetal affect into dialogue. Such an approach is in line with recent shifts in discourses of agency and interactivity in game studies, which criticize these two terms the field them being too binary, masculine, and not accommodating alternative forms of engagement with games (Fizek, 2022;Jennings, 2019;Kagen, 2022;Keogh, 2018), with recent scholarship on agency especially calling for a politicisation of the term and a call to delve into the significance of meaningful empowerment to act in/with/on/through games (Chia & Ruffino, 2022). It is also following in the footsteps of recent efforts to consider agency through a sociological lens (Muriel & Crawford, 2020).…”

“…At the intersection of this doing and being is another idea with a conceptual history about as long as game studies itself: agency. Recent years saw a move towards politicising the term, with scholars challenging long-standing truisms about agency as the ability to act freely on/with/through the world, problematising the relationship between humans and their social, economic, cultural, and technological contexts (Chia & Ruffino, 2022;Girina & Jung, 2020). Notably, agency has been linked with the promotion of individualistic selfhoods that are predominantly "masculinist, colonial, and extractivist" (Chia & Ruffino, 2022, p. 309).…”