![]() A final reason to further differentiate the subject of play is that the playing subject is inevitably separate from the player-subject: the ludoliterate player behind the interface. Much like the way in which power structures are prerequisites for the subject, a ludic structure provides a pre-requisite for the voluntarily subjectification of the playing subject. ![]() ![]() The mechanism by which ludic structures function as governing structures is akin to a Foucaultian model of power relations. Indeed, player behaviour is to a large extent meaningful only in that it is necessitated through the game’s ruleset and possible world: its presented affordances, constraints and goals amount to what is commonly called a ludic contract (Pratt, 2010) or lusory attitude (Suits, 1978, 35), a certain surrender to the fiction and goals of the game. Already in the early 21st century this concept of ‘interactivity’ was problematized (cf. Such a playing, or controlling entity is often lauded as essentially autonomous, due to the freedom granted by interactive media. As a case study, Galactic Café’s The Stanley Parable (2007, 2013) proves a case in point: the game takes a lot of effort to rhetorically differentiate these distinct subjects within the context of the game. Already, we may distinguish in this skin-subject the played entity of the avatar among the other presented content of the game and distinguish it from the person outside of the game. This presence of the player does not fully correlate with the player as moral subject, but is rather a “skin-subject in contact with the world outside the game, which in return does have influence over how a player experiences a certain game” (2009, 102). Firstly, philosopher and game scholar Miguel Sicart proposes a perspective on games as spaces of morality in which the player can be present. My presentation works through this paradox with the aid of Miguel Sicart’s ‘skin-subject,’ and Michel Foucault’s concept of governance in order to provide a model of the subject of play as one necessarily split between the played, playing and player-subject. Another tradition regards players as principially demystifying (Friedman, 1995) or deconstructing agents (Raessens, 2011) that, through playing, dismantle the game along with any seductive ideology or bias. One tradition regards the ‘rehearsal’ of subject positions within ludic structures as a construction of Althusserian interpellated subjects (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009). How to theorize the subject of play? The modern field of game studies knows two paradoxical ontologies of the subject of the player. Through theatrical techniques of enstrangement, game-play may reveal uncritical familiarity with the quasi-natural conventions of ideology – be they generic, social or political. An understanding of game-play as dialectical process akin to the relation between subjects and ideological power structures furthermore demands a recognition of the critical potential of game-play. Through close analyses of Cart Life, the Stanley Parable and Spec Ops: the Line I argue for game-play as a dialectical process, past academic scholarship that posits either games as procedural systems of interpellation or play as mythical unrestrained creativity. That subject of play, meanwhile, is split between played subject (the presented avatar and the game’s content), the playing subject as demanded by the ludic power structure of rules and the interpreting subject that is tasked to understand and inform the process of game-play. Comparing roughly twenty years of scholarship on ideological play, ludology, narratology, game design, proceduralism and play-centred studies, I argue that games dynamically present stylized simulations of a possible world, occurring to the subject of play in a here-and-now that at once grants autonomy while doing so in a paradoxically rigid structure of affordances, constraints and desires. By addressing the structural parallels between ideology and digital games as organizations of quasi-natural conventions, I argue in this thesis that games have the capacity to model, propose and reflect on ideologies. ![]() ![]() They do so perhaps more so than linear narrative media, as game-play presents both fictional worlds, systems and a spect-actor present as participatory agent. Digital games provide a fruitful comparison to ideologies because they resemble ideologies as an organizing structure entered into and because they serve as a systematic test case for alternatively organized (ideological) worlds. ![]()
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