Street, Zoyander and Suchman, Lucy and MacKenzie, Adrian (2024) Faulty Connections : Affective Imaginaries in Peripheral Digital Games. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.
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Abstract
This thesis and associated exhibition view digital games as playful affective structures, which give users and developers a space for figuring out feelings. It is particularly generative to think about game design this way in contexts where there is uncertainty or controversy about how something should feel, or how one should feel about something. I explore figurations of “dynamics” and “aesthetics” in interactive design at the peripheries of games culture, particularly for emerging devices and interfaces with an ambiguous role in social life: early mobile games, recent VR software development, and my own installations of recycled computers and custom hardware in galleries and disused retail spaces. I view game design’s social role as expressing and inscribing affective imaginaries, helping to shape human-human and human-device relationships. An interdisciplinary analysis of affective imaginaries in peripheral games forms the written part of this PhD. Looking at early mobile games and virtual pets, I discuss affective actions such as nurturing, and affective narratives in developers’ accounts of their players’ relationships to their games, connecting these to broader ideas about how users practice “care” through mobile devices. I then look at narratives related to care in discourse around queer indie games, drawing on scholars’ and artists’ critiques of “empathy” narratives that position queer creators as an empathised-with “other”. This informs my 6analysis of early VR applications in which this “empathy machine” narrative has evolved into an imaginary of hi-tech virtual re-embodiment for social good. I have found this way of viewing affect in game design helpful for reflecting on my own art practice, which in turn is a reflection of my research. Throughout the thesis, I discuss artworks that I present in the digital exhibition, which have recontextualised some of the strategies and themes that emerged from this research. Following my study of early mobile virtual pets, I created a “petting zoo” using recycled computers. To further explore affective imaginaries of care and empathy, I applied similar petting dynamics to non-fiction works representing transgender people’s stories as “interactive portraits”. Finally, following analysis of empathy discourse and queer embodiment in video games and VR, I created an ironic “self-portrait” that has the player interrogate how subjectivity is constructed. This exploration of affect in game design is informed by developments in queer game studies, led by scholars such as Bo Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw and building on work on affect by queer theorists such as Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick and Sara Ahmed. By combining practice and analysis, I hope to contribute to this field a sympathetic critique of the affective imaginaries of the games sector. I hope that through this practice-based approach, in which I notice a dynamic and observe what happens when it is recontextualised, there might be a way to avoid the temptation to fall into “paranoid readings” (Kosofsky-Sedgwick) when critiquing the biopolitics of using interactive media to stimulate desirable affects in a player, even prosocial emotions such as empathy. The political significance of affective imaginaries has been clear in events such as Gamergate, which showed that what is at stake in game design and consumption is not just individual players’ emotions, but an interdependent social meaning space that structures normative affects and marks, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, recognisable strangers with alien affect. This thesis contributes a responsive and reflective approach to practising and critiquing interactive design that attempts to influence how someone else feels. The online exhibition is the subject of the three Reflections included in the body of the thesis. It can be found at zoyander.cc/games/exhibition. Additionally, content including photographs, source code, and video footage are stored in Lancaster University Library.