Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

future for the human body. Donna Haraway’s work is particularly influential here. For Haraway, ‘a cyborg is
a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of
fiction’ (Haraway 1990: 191). This ambiguous status is bound up with the cyborg’s descriptive and utopian
possibilities for Haraway, and it is reflected in the diverse ways in which this figure has been discussed. For
some it suggests that the posthuman is predicated on observations or warnings that the corporeal aspects of
the human are, or will be, undergoing transformation. Others invoke the cyborg and the posthuman
(following Latour for example) to argue that humans and human societies have always been technosocial and
hence never simply or exclusively ‘human’. Elsewhere these imagined and actual bodily changes are
interrogated from a post-structuralist tradition for their implications for prevailing notions of subjectivity,
i.e. it is humanism as a post-Enlightenment meta-discourse that is undergoing transformation (Badmington
2000). This could be termed ‘critical posthumanism’. The work of Haraway is again central here. This latter
posthumanism strikes a chord with Science and Technology Studies, for example in a special issue of the
journal Cultural Critique in 2003, and in debates between, for instance, Haraway and Latour.
The question of what kind of relationship between the human and the technological is brought into
being in videogame play is the focus of Part 4.
methodological questions
1. this thesis will offer critiques of established Media and Film Studies models of textual analysis for
videogames as interactive / cybernetic media, and propose instead cybertextual analysis
2. it will draw on ethnographic approaches to media consumption and play, in particular small-scale studies.
It will argue that the very small-scale and intimate circuit between player and game is a vital object of
analysis.
3. A synthesis is needed between these analytical and ethnographic methods given the project’s
unwillingness to establish an a priori asymmetry between videogame (as ‘text’), videogameplay (as
consumption or practice) and videogameplayer (embodied media subject). I call this synthetic approach
microethnography. This microethnography will have to challenge the anthropocentrism of ethnography and
anthropology (the etymology of these terms roots them in the study of human society and ‘Man’) to attend to
nonhuman as well as human agencies in play. Therefore cybercultural and STS concepts and approaches will
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