Beyond agency: games as the aesthetics of being

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here, we should add the caveat that there have been a number of recent approaches in game studies that, drawing on a more fluid, post-humanist understanding of agency (invested, for instance, in Latourian actor-network theory or Karen Barad’s critical posthumanism), have moved to sideline the empowered, discrete human player as the agent of play (see, for example, Janik 2018).

2. Here, we might note another echo of Fink’s philosophy of play – specifically, of Fink’s observation that play involves a ‘double existence’ – on the one hand, the ‘human being who plays’, and, on the other hand, the role the player takes on in the particular game (Fink [1960] 2015, 25). With regards to digital games in particular, this also echoes the observation, in Gualeni and Vella, that the subjectivities we adopt in virtual worlds (such as those of digital games) are subordinate or nested subjectivities, always existing in relation to our subjective being in the actual world (2020, 12).

3. Of course, there are also many digital games which structure a ludic subject-position upon situation of multiple or distributed embodiments, or upon an entirely disembodied engagement with the gameworld (Vella 2016b).