Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

easons of focus – I hope that the conceptual frameworks developed here will be robust enough to allow
considerations of techno-economics of everyday life to be factored in.
science or technoscience
As its name suggests, Science and Technology Studies is equally concerned with science (or ‘technoscience’)
as with technologies. Cybercultural studies and cyberfeminism has and is undertaking crucial work on
(techno)science, for instance on genetic engineering or reproductive technologies. Again for reasons of focus
this project is concerned with the technological and technocultural and not with science.
networks and the Internet
The thesis is centrally concerned with videogames but will touch on other new media technologies and forms
(e.g. the Web) as and when relevant. It will be argued that an understanding of videogames is crucial to the
study of popular new media, but it should be pointed out that this project does not fully explore key
differences with other new media forms. As will be discussed in Part 1.1, recent new media studies has
privileged the Internet as its key object of study. A key premise in this context is that videogames are not the
insignificant phenomenon they are often portrayed as, but exemplars of both the everyday experience of
computer-based media, and a technological imaginary of new media – at least as significant as the Internet.
My concern in this study is in part with the implications of the intimate relationships between the
human and the technological in videogame play, i.e. between the player, the computer or console and the
game (as software). To maintain focus therefore, I will not be studying multiplayer games or the multiplayer
options of games which offer a choice between single- and multi-play. This is not to ignore networked
computer media - Parts 1 and 3 cover the literature on the continuities and ruptures in everyday life and
notions of identity as they are permeated by new media – computer games in general and non-instrumental,
ludic uses of computer technologies and Internet media in general. Moreover, a clear distinction between
videogames and the Internet as discrete new media is no longer sustainable. As well as numerous web-based
games, since this project was started in the late 1990s, a distinctly new form of computer game has
developed. Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as Everquest and World of
Warcraft offer the graphic and spatial qualities of console and singleplayer PC games but within the much
more open-ended, social, and performative structure developed in the MUDs. Millions of players are
registered for single games, and tens of thousands might be playing at any one time. The new forms of
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