Abstract: Eugénie Shinkle’s piece Digital Games and the Anamorphic Subject reassesses the visual lineages that prefigure contemporary gaming forms. Games, in the process of locating gamers in space, draw on the tradition of anamorphic art exemplified by Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Recasting the regimes of vision and attention in these terms facilitates new insights into gaming subjectivity.

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Abstract: Laurie Johnson tracks conflicting messages of embodiment and symbolic exchange in the infamous “Mr. Bungle” affair in which a chatroom avatar was forcibly removed from the participant’s control. Arguing that many scholarly treatments recapitulate a binary of real and virtual space in order to evaluate the event according to broader social norms, rather than attending to its specific material context. A discussion of the history of the internet and Vannevar Bush’s ‘memex’ authorises a more nuanced reading of the metaphor of rape in terms of systematised memory and narrativity.

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Abstract Felicity J. Colman opens up the variety of virtual positions and affective regimes with which we form space and play-place. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, the piece considers the orientation to action of gaming bodies through intensities of affect. The modality of such auto-affections allows response by other bodies in motion, and in this invitation to response constitutes the potential for community and political engagement within and beyond its own space.

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Abstract: Peter Eric Bayliss analyses the video installation A Game of Marbles, whose unique relation between control and visualisation dislocates our assumptions about the ‘location’ of gameplay and player. Experimental efforts by audiences to engage with the piece further open up the consequences of the installation’s premise, a complex interplay between computation, control and representation.

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