Intra-Active Play: What Do Video Games Have to Do with Quantum Physics?

Sonia Fizek's paper argues that the conventional understanding of players and games as pre-existing, independent subjects and objects is inadequate for digital play. Drawing on Karen Barad's agential realism, the author proposes a posthuman and performative media aesthetics in which players and games come into being only through the act of play, entangled in a mutual "ludic embrace." The central claim is that video games have never truly been interactive in the sense of a symmetrical flow of action from human to machine; instead, the paper proposes replacing interaction with intra-action, a fluid entanglement of forces in which agency is distributed across human and nonhuman elements.

The theoretical framing situates Barad's work within the broader "material turn," alongside Latour's actor-network theory, Foucault's dispositive, Bateson's ecology of mind, and new materialism and posthumanism. A shared thread across these approaches is the rejection of the Western anthropocentric view of the human as the central agent, and the treatment of matter as active rather than "dead." The author also suggests that the data-gathering nature of computerized games makes them analogous to measurement apparatuses, with game analytics offered as a specific field illustrating the convergence of agential realism and gaming.

The paper is a short extended abstract presented at DiGRA 2022, and it is primarily conceptual rather than empirical, so it offers no survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings. Its scope is philosophical and theoretical, drawing on examples from the existing literature, including Justyna Janik's work on video game glitches and Conor McKeown's analysis of Super Mario World code injection. The bibliography spans physics, feminist theory, and game studies, indicating an interdisciplinary orientation aimed at reframing how scholars conceptualize digital play.