Digital Extensions and Performed Players: A Theoretical Model for the Video/Computer Game
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Despite over twenty years of studies, scholars have yet to identify a productive theoretical model for the video game that does not depend on a fragmentary understanding of its form. Following Pierre Bourdieu's contention that the purpose of criticism is to understand cultural products as distinct scientific objects, and Marshall McLuhan's theory that the message and formative power of media are the media themselves, this study attempts to generate a foundational critical understanding of the video game. Building on the most lucrative intrinsic (such as David Myer's 1991 Computer Game Semiotics) and extrinsic (such as Jeffrey Goldstein's 1998 Immortal Kombat) studies of the medium, this study proposes that the video game be understood not as direct involvement (as many others have attempted to do) nor as a passive digital performance (as equally many have done), but as a mediated interaction between digital representations and organic activity. In this process of interaction, the video game generates a specialized kind of electronic narcissism, what Melaine Klein called "positions," the projections of polar or conflated understandings of self into idealized objects. A mediated, or "performed player" emerges from the medium, generated by the interaction between the digital representation on the screen and the organic human being controlling the actions of the digital representation. The author of this chapter suggests that this performed player is a useful starting point for both intrinsic analyses of games and extrinsic studies of the educational, cognitive, and psychological efficacy of games in empirical reality. As such this study challenges psychoanalytic theories and their applicability to understanding imagined selves as well as providing a wide-ranging analysis of the limitations of previous video game scholarship.
Repository Citation
Fisler, Ben. "Digital Extensions and Performed Players: A Theoretical Model for the Video/Computer Game." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 1, 2006, pp. 1. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss1/11