Gran Turismo 7 and Me: An Autoethnographic Approach to Ludic Subjectivity

This paper presents an autoethnographic study of Gran Turismo 7 (Polyphony Digital, 2022), using the author's own play as the primary site of analysis. Its central aim is to examine how the game's formal structures establish a ludic subject-position that the player is invited to inhabit, and how the resulting "ludic self" is shaped through a negotiation between those structures and the player's sociocultural situatedness. Drawing on the concept of the implied player, the theory of ludic subjectivity, and T.L. Taylor's notion of the assemblage of play, the paper argues that the lived meaning of gameplay emerges at the interface between game, player, and the habitus of playing.

The analysis identifies several distinct subject-positions the game offers: the embodied racing driver engaged in goal-oriented "striving play," the collector seeking to complete the garage, and the gearhead tweaking vehicle settings with extraludic automotive knowledge. The paper also examines accumulationist mechanics such as in-game credits and the Daily Workout system, which it reads as structuring habitual obligation and interpellating players into neoliberal subjectivities of quantifiable self-optimization. A further strand considers how the game's fetishistic treatment of the car as commodity and cultural object decontextualizes it from labour conditions, environmental costs, and the fossil fuel industry, producing a "cozy" presentation of abundance and ease. Its engagement with car culture's gendered associations and its Western-centric framing of centre and periphery is also given sustained attention.

Methodologically, the study relies on close self-observation and reflection, informed by Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and cultural capital, alongside work on aesthetic self-fashioning and avatar dress. The author's own gender, class, national identity, and cultural background are treated as integral to the interpretive process rather than as external variables. The paper therefore contributes a detailed, reflexive account of how a single player negotiates the meanings a commercial racing game proposes.