Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities [Hardcover]

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Proposing the Posthuman Gamer

Chapter 3: Who am I ? Troubling the Self

Chapter 4: From Acting to Intra-Acting

Chapter 5: Enacting and Embodying Empathy

Chapter 6: Emergent Subject Positions

Chapter 7: From Emergence to (Susp)endings

Chapter 8: A Contingent Conclusion

Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities explores the relationship between avatar and gamer in the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game World of Warcraft, to examine notions of entangled subjectivity, affects, and embodiments  what it means and how it feels to be posthuman.

With a focus on posthuman subjectivity, Wilde considers how we can begin to articulate ourselves when the boundary between self and other is unclear. Drawing on fieldnotes of her own gameplay experiences, the author analyses how subjectivity is formed in ways that defy a single individual notion of self, and explores how different practices, feelings, and societal understandings can disrupt strict binaries and emphasise our posthumanism. She interrogates if one can speak of an I in the face of posthuman multiplicity, before exploring different analytical themes, beginning with how acting theories might be posthumanised and articulate the relationship between avatar and gamer. She then defines posthuman empathy and explains how this is experienced in gaming, before addressing the need to account for boredom, the complexity of nostalgia, and ways death and loss are experienced through gaming.

This volume will appeal to a broad audience and is particularly relevant to scholars and students of cultural studies, media studies, humanities, and game studies.

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