Abstractions of a Meaningless Act: (Spending) Time in the Gaming World

This document is a short theoretical proposal by Vanessa Long of Brunel University, UK, examining how video games depict familiar real-world activities such as spending money, transporting oneself, trading goods, and making contact with others. Its central thesis is that these familiar acts gain meaning in games only because players already understand them from everyday life, yet once abstracted into a game system they risk becoming empty of that meaning. The author argues that this duality of circumstance, in which game elements are separate entities that nonetheless draw on external understanding, raises questions about how such abstractions are interpreted.

The text identifies several areas of focus for the proposed study: extreme content including violence, items and acts taken from reality, and familiarities shared across games. The author proposes analyzing these through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore how games play with players' imaginings of what things mean and how they signify. The aim is to use this framework to illuminate the processes at work when people engage in play, rather than to present empirical findings.

The document contains no survey data, statistics, sample sizes, or quantitative methodology, and its geographic and temporal scope is not defined beyond the author's institutional affiliation. Its methodology is theoretical and interpretive, anchored in a proposed bibliography drawing on psychoanalytic and cultural theory, including works by Lacan, Žižek, Barthes, and Felman, as well as Jagodzinski's study of media fantasy.