Human, Machine, Play: Donna Haraway in/and Game Studies

Key insights

7 takeaways

01
Game studies has largely embraced Donna Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' as a celebration of boundary-transgressing pleasure while downplaying her warnings about cyborg technologies as instruments of control, militarism, and patriarchy.
02
Haraway's 'Cyborg Manifesto' (1985) explicitly criticizes videogames as 'heavily orientated to individual competition and extraterrestrial warfare' and as a driver of a permanent high-tech military establishment that costs most people, especially women.
03
The author argues the field's selective reading of Haraway reflects a broader tendency in game studies to avoid investigating how videogames participate in systems of oppression, a tendency Haraway herself explicitly rejected.
04
Haraway's remark linking videogames to tourism is read as a critique of 'identity tourism,' where players partially identify with violent, expropriating characters, and of how the medium's mobility and exchange skew toward white, Western, masculine experiences.
05
In 'Staying with the Trouble' (2016), Haraway names the Indigenous-developed game Never Alone (Upper One Games, 2014) a 'world game' while explicitly rejecting claims that it offers universal oneness or a solution to the Anthropocene, showing her optimism coexists with critical caution.
06
Other scholars such as Hoofd (2019), Jansen (2020), and Kocurek (2018) have supported Haraway's feminist and Marxist skepticism of videogames with more substantial evidence, undermining dismissals of her critique as paranoia.
07
The author concludes that game studies should engage Haraway's work with the same criticality she brings, rather than treating the cyborg as an unambiguously utopian figure.

Summary

This paper examines how the work of feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway has been read and applied within game studies, contrasting that scholarship with Haraway's own explicit comments on videogames. Its central thesis is that Haraway's figure of the cyborg has been adopted largely as a utopian emblem of boundary-crossing pleasure, while the more pessimistic dimensions of her argument, concerning militarism, patriarchy, and the imposition of control, have been comparatively neglected. The author reads this selective reception as a broader tendency in the field to avoid investigating how videogames participate in systems of oppression, a tendency Haraway herself has criticized.

The analysis traces the cyborg concept through feminist game scholarship, noting its productive use in theorizing embodied relationships between players and their machines, while observing that many theorizations overlook Haraway's warnings about a world of technological control. Attention then turns to Haraway's direct critiques of the medium, particularly in the "Cyborg Manifesto," where she characterizes videogames as oriented toward individual competition and militarized high-tech culture, and links them to the commercial logic of tourism and exchange. The paper argues that these critiques align with the work of other scholars who document militarized masculinity, identity tourism, and the entanglement of games with neoliberal capitalism and the military-entertainment complex.

The study is primarily a conceptual and textual essay rather than an empirical investigation, drawing on Haraway's major writings, including the "Cyborg Manifesto," "Situated Knowledges," and Staying with the Trouble, alongside a broad range of game studies and media theory literature. Its scope is intellectual rather than geographic or temporal, spanning late twentieth-century feminist theory through recent game scholarship. The author concludes that Haraway's optimism coexists with a necessary criticality that game studies should adopt when engaging with her work.