Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

new media studies - i.e. the study of new media, but also suggest a new media studies - a rethinking of
Media Studies in contemporary technoculture.
These arguments will be pursued through the circumscription of nested concerns and discourses.
The widest circle encompasses theories of technology and culture in general, within that lies
considerations of computer technology and culture, and within that computer media in everyday life and
popular culture. Concentricity is not possible though: some consideration of non-media domestic
technology will be needed, and theories of identity, embodiment, human and nonhuman agency, and
play will loop through all the above following their own eccentric orbits.
These premises will be pursued through the following conceptual and methodological concerns:
how to analyse and theorise the videogame as a popular new media form, i.e. as both screen media
images and scenarios, and as computer software – to what extent can textual analysis, developed to
study film and television, identify the particular dynamics of game and of software;
how to analyse and theorise videogameplay as a technocultural practice or event, in which both
human and nonhuman agency is in operation – to what extent are established theories of consumption
in everyday life adequate to the study of these events;
how to analyse and theorise videogameplayers – to what extent can the cybercultural rhetoric of
cybernetics, cyborgs and the posthuman be used to account for the real circuits of technologies, media
images, play and subjectivity - to what extent can ethnographic research describe these circuits?
The thesis will conclude by offering a new model of technoculture in everyday life. It will shift analytical and
critical attention away from established research objects and notions (the ‘impact’ of technologies,
consumption, identities and subjectivity, interactivity) and towards the ‘event’ of gameplay as one with
nonhuman as well as human participants, and brought into being by relationships, and translations, of
human and nonhuman agency.
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