Posthuman Gaming

Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities

Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK)

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English

Routledge
18 December 2024

Art & Architecture; Philosophy; Popular culture; Media studies; Digital animation

Series: Routledge Advances in Game Studies

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments – what it means and how it feels to be posthuman.

With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of “self”, and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an “I” in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming.

This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies.

By: Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University UK)
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 430g
ISBN: 9781032074962
ISBN 10: 1032074965
Series: Routledge Advances in Game Studies
Pages: 222
Publication Date: 18 December 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Proposing the Posthuman Gamer Chapter 3: Who am ""I""? Troubling the Self Chapter 4: From Acting to Intra-Acting Chapter 5: Enacting and Embodying Empathy Chapter 6: Emergent Subject Positions Chapter 7: From Emergence to (Susp)endings Chapter 8: A Contingent Conclusion

Poppy Wilde is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Birmingham City University, UK. Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are entangled and embodied.

Reviews for Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities

""Posthuman Gaming sounds like a paradoxical proposition: a posthumanist account of digital gameplay, grounded in rich autoethnographic reflections on the author’s personal relationship with her avatar. But by using her individual experiences to think through the limits of individualism Wilde demonstrates how the conceptual and methodological tools we have inherited from humanism can be repurposed to imagine more ethical and empathetic posthuman futures - and how videogames might help us get there."" Rob Gallagher, Lecturer in Games and Immersive Media, King's College London ""I found Posthuman Gaming to be an engaging, important read that will be relevant to scholars, researchers and graduate students in game studies as well as cultural studies more broadly. Likewise, this monograph does a commendable job of demonstrating how posthumanist concepts such as ‘intra-action’ and entangled subjectivities add to our understanding of gaming, and how because they apply to such a popular topic, they could be applicable more broadly as well."" Maria K. Alberto, University of Utah