Friday 13th & Saturday 14th May

Who or what is at play in computer games?

Computer game play is at once an intense media experience of interaction with flows of images, sound and action, and a cybernetic feedback loop between software, hardware, bodies and brains. The common experiences of compulsion and immersion that characterise computer game play have yet to be adequately theorised: what are the distinct pleasures (and anxieties) engendered through play with computers? How can we theorise agency in these technological networks and gameworlds animated by artificial life, virtual physics and computer-controlled entities as well as human players?

This symposium will address computer games, computer game play, and computer game players as analytically inseparable. What questions does this raise for the study of computer games as popular media texts or events; for theories of spectatorship and subjectivity in film and media studies or agency in the study of technoculture; for our understanding of distinctions between the human and the technological?

How can we theorise the intimate relationships between the human, the textual, the ludic, and the technological in the act of gameplay?