Video Games and the Cerebral Subject: On Playing <i>Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3</i>

Väliaho, Pasi

doi:10.1177/1357034x14546057

Cited by 11 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…When the player exposes the lack in the Other, they also reveal that there is no Other who knows. Videogame theorists often argue that videogames hold biopolitical (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009) and even neurological (Ash, 2015; Väliaho, 2014) power over players. This argument clearly holds weight, but it also relies on a belief in an all-seeing Other who works behind the scenes to ensure its power is being upheld and enforced.…”

Section: Gorogoamentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa

Nicoll

2021

Games and Culture

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It seems intuitive to conflate the gamic gaze with the player’s act of looking. To do so, however, would be to inherit from the first wave of psychoanalytic screen theory a misleading presupposition that the gaze is synonymous with the look. Taking influence from new Lacanian film theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, this article contends that the gamic gaze is an object in the visual field of play that disrupts the mastery of the player’s look. I develop this argument through an analysis of the 2017 videogame Gorogoa. By confronting the player with the gaze, Gorogoa reveals that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play consists in the player’s unconscious drive to fail rather than their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. To borrow terminology from Copjec, the gamic gaze marks the point of the player’s culpability—rather than visibility—in the visual field of play.

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Section: Gorogoamentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa

Nicoll

2021

Games and Culture

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“…As Väliaho articulates, the standard FPS is ‘visuomotor: in them, eye merges with hand, vision with gesture…The contents of perception are something we enact when probing the world with our sensorimotor capacities and skills’ (2014: 121). In an FPS, the eye targets ; in a WS, the eye searches .…”

Section: Heating Up/cooling Downmentioning

confidence: 99%

Playing it Cool: Considering McLuhan’s Hot and Cool taxonomy for Game Studies

Conway

Ouellette

2019

Convergence

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While Marshall McLuhan is often acknowledged as an influential theorist for Game Studies, there is very little work currently available that directly attempts to apply McLuhan’s theoretical framework and terminology. This article, therefore, provides an overview, interrogation and application of McLuhan’s taxonomy of Hot and Cool media to digital games. McLuhan describes Hot media as ‘high fidelity’ and ‘low participation’, while Cool media are conversely ‘high participation’ and ‘low fidelity’. The article summarizes McLuhan’s conceptual spectrum and articulates how these qualities can exist not only within digital games but also within the player: their skills, competencies and literacies. In doing so, we propose the further quality of ‘pattern’ to better describe how Hot and Cool features operate within game experiences. The article finally discusses how Hot and Cool game designs can impact user’s affective, cognitive, motoric and sociocultural responses to the play experience.

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“…A recent special issue edited by Smith and Hetherington (2013) continues this theme on Urban Rhythms examining the rhythms of carnival crowds (Jaguaribe, 2013), the railway station (Revill, 2013), and the twenty-four-hour city (Smith and Hall, 2013). Henriques et al (2014) bring a range of historical antecedents to Lefebre's writing on rhythms, including Bode (2014), Laban (2014), and Spencer (1867), to bear on contemporary understandings of embodiment, culture, and rhythm in a collection that investigates the rhythms of gymnastics and dance (Crespi, 2014), of playing video games (Va¨liaho, 2014), and those involved in the sonic events of digital sound installations (Ikoniadou, 2014). Moreover, as described above, various theories of practice have adopted ideas from rhythmanalysis to explain the constitution of objective temporal rhythms.…”

Section: A Rhythmic Ontology Of Practicementioning

confidence: 99%

Institutional rhythms: Combining practice theory and rhythmanalysis to conceptualise processes of institutionalisation

Blue

2017

Time & Society

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The practice turn in social theory has renewed interest in conceptualising the temporal organisation of social life as a way of explaining contemporary patterns of living and consuming. As a result, the interest to develop analyses of time in both practice theories and practice theory-based empirical research is increasing. Practice theorists draw on theories of time and ideas about temporal rhythms to explain how practices are organised in everyday life. To date, they have studied how temporal experiences matter for the coordination of daily life, how temporal landscapes matter for issues of societal synchronisation, and how timespace/s matter for the organisation of human activity. While several studies refer to, draw on, and position themselves in relation to ideas about temporal rhythms, those working with theories of practice have yet to fully utilise the potential of Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis for explaining the constitution of, and more specifically, changes within, social life. I argue that rhythmanalysis can be effectively combined with practice theory to better articulate the ways in which practices become connected through what I describe as processes of institutionalisation. I argue that this combination requires repositioning the role of time in theories of practice as neither experience, nor as landscape, but, building on Schatzki’s work on The Timespace of Human Activity, as practice itself. Drawing on Lefebvre’s concepts of arrhythmia and eurhythmia, and developing Parkes and Thrift’s notion of entrainment, I illustrate how institutional rhythms, as self-organising, open, spatiotemporal practices emerge, endure, and evolve in ways that matter for both socio-temporal landscapes and temporal experiences.

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Video Games and the Cerebral Subject: On Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Cited by 11 publications

References 22 publications

Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa

Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa

Playing it Cool: Considering McLuhan’s Hot and Cool taxonomy for Game Studies

Institutional rhythms: Combining practice theory and rhythmanalysis to conceptualise processes of institutionalisation

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