The Politics of Games

Abstract

Chapter 9 combines questions about digital technologies with issues of everyday behaviour, specifically leisure and play. The chapter asks under what conditions playful activities can be political, how digital games can serve as vehicles for political communication, and how we might analyse games. It shows how digital games are often storytelling devices that produce discourses about society; how they are aesthetic experiences; how they are algorithmic machines that generate certain outcomes; and how they are highly interactive, relying on one or more users to create their media experience by manipulating a digital interface and inviting users to inhabit digital spaces. Readers learn to combine the methods learned previously and explore these issues through autoethnographic experimentations.